Archiving, No Longer a Want

In the current economy many people are scaling back on all forms of spending. Our world's spending habits have changed from wants and desires to focusing only on needs. This is clear across not only personal spending habits but corporate purchases as well. Large "non-essential" purchases have been delayed if not cancelled all together.

Keeping this in mind, we're seeing a really interesting trend in archive deployments and archive spending. Our first quarter of 2009 saw an increase of opportunities of over 300% over the same quarter a year ago and 250% over the 4th quarter of 2009. Already only 15 days into Q2 we've already seen more inquiries this quarter than we did in the same quarter of 2008, which puts us on pace to a 200% increase over Q1 2009.

These statistics and trends that we are seeing along with what our partners are seeing, is that archiving has moved beyond a want in corporate data centers. Clearly the benefits of archiving and storage efficiencies that come with it are being defined as a need across all verticals.

Another trend that shows that migrations are a large part of this is we had many application vendors reach out to us in the first quarter of this year to add support for their applications to PAMM. Look for some of these announcements throughout the rest of this quarter as our solutions become integrated.

Archiving is now critical to almost every organization, ensure you perform proper due diligence in selecting your new archive for the solution that best fits your needs and look to PAMM to help you get there.

Which archive solution is best for me?

One question that our technical and sales teams get asked all the time is "Which application/solution should we pick?" One thing that is guaranteed is that we'll never provide an answer to this. Being in the unique position as the industry leader in the archive migration market, we enable all of our partners sell their products. We make the commitment to our partners that we will support them, but will not recommend them.

This doesn't stop our customers from asking, so what we do is position this back to our customers. "What is important for your archive solution?" While all archiving applications perform the same basic tasks, the key for each customer is in the finer details. What are their goals of the archive app. Some companies may want to ensure it is totally hands off to them, so for these customers, we're migrating from an on-premise to a Cloud provider. Others may have a specific need in e-discovery that only one on-premise solution provides. Here we'll perform an on-premise to on-premise migration.

Why are there so many options for archiving today? There is no company that does everything perfectly yet today. Each partner performs certain tasks better than any other one out there, but isn't the end all be all for everyone. If there was, the competition wouldn't be as fierce as it is today.

Which archive solution is best for me? The answer is simple, which ever one fulfills your greatest needs. For each company, this will be an absolute unique list based upon their user's requirements. The good news is, there is a solution out there for you.

Migrating Shortcuts - Why Bother?

Bob Spurzem over at Ferris Research this morning discussed some key issues and points to consider when performing archive migrations. As the leader in the archive migration market, our team has focused a lot of effort into dealing with shortcuts. (http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/03/email-archive-migration-plan-for-stubbing/)

One can argue "You should not use shortcuts anyway"

Sure, but go tell that to your user community that has 1000's if not 10,000's of shortcuts in their Exchange mailbox and tell them that they are going to go away because it is not good practice to have them. That should go over very well. Some of the user archives that we have migrated had over 60,000 shortcuts in a single mailbox. Not exactly the easiest thing to transition users from using.

So this brings up a key point in selecting an archive migration application. Simply being able to move the archived content from one platform to another is not enough. The absolute must is to ensure that all data is migrated and that end users are not impacted. Users typically resist change, even if they are told it will be good change. Making sure how they get access to their data stays consistent is an absolute.

So why bother migrating shortcuts? Well, if you don't, just be ready for the user revolt...