This IDC study provides an updated market sizing of the worldwide email archiving applications market in 2007 as well as the updated forecast for 2008-2012. Coverage includes email archiving applications delivered as software/appliances and hosted services.

Laura DuBois, program director for IDC's Storage Software notes, "Critical to supplier success in this market will be the ability to expand information management services to provide a federated approach to classification, retention, preservation (legal holds), migration, expiration, destruction, monitoring/auditing, and content mining of unstructured content. While the market was born out of a focus on email, we see firms expanding their information management focus to a broader set of content types such as office data, SharePoint, other content repositories, and rich media. Firms that are not architected and positioned to expand their services and content coverage will not be long-term players."

Vivian Tero, program manager for Compliance Infrastructure, also adds, "Despite the slowdown in the broader economy, compliance and eDiscovery-related spending continues to be a driver of IT spend. IDC surveys continue to show that mail archiving applications consistently rank among the top 3 investment priorities. Most corporations see these applications as strategic defensive spend to mitigate risk from future litigation and regulatory events. IDC anticipates a slight downward adjustment in the 2008 growth rates but expects spending to resume its original forecast growth trajectory in 2010."