Current Market Conditions

The current market conditions are certainly creating many challenges for all of us. Whether it is a reduction in work force at your employer or trying to buy a new car. GMAC's announcement that they will only approve those with a FICO score over 700, will limit who can gain financing to the vast majority of the public in today's world. Yet they wonder why they can't sell cars ;)

When people ask me how we're "weathering the storm" and how we're adjusting to the "new market", I tell them the truth. We're hiring people, we're expediting our new product version releases and we're going to have our largest quarter in the history of the company.

To some this is shocking, to others who know the market we are in or in similar markets, they explain that they are doing the same and seeing the same growth potential. In the world of archiving, the data exists for a reason. It exists solely for the function of being able to access it in the future.

What the market is discovering is that their existing applications and storage platforms are unable to retrieve the data in either a fast enough time frame or the fact that some applications are failing all together. Here is the issue. The main function these applications are to provide, they can not. Procedo re-enables our customers to be able to discover this data by migrating it from one archive platform to another in a guaranteed method.

In the times of increased oversight, mergers & acquisitions, takeovers, shareholder lawsuits; the one key item for all of these will be a need for e-discovery solutions. Being able to move the data forward into applications, storage or even SaaS providers that can produce the data on demand as needed will be critical for these companies and exactly what Procedo does. We enable these companies to respond to the demands that are being placed on them in terms of their archived data.

Transformation of Email Archiving

I started my technology career around the time Microsoft Mail was being introduced and messages were being sent to other employees just to see "did you really get that"? After this amazing addition of technology happened, the company I worked for added a 'dial-up gateway' where messages were sent over this magical thing called the Internet, it queued messages up on the server and dialed up and processed these messages, checked to see if any were destined for its users and then hung up, only to do the task again at a blazing speed of 14.4 kbps in another 3o minutes.

Email archiving in its rawest form has been around as long as the email environmnets have existed. Users have saved emails into some form of a personal archive, corporations have saved email on tape, made duplicate copies, or some other form of application to secure and store email longer than it was perhaps "intended" to be around. Regardless, it is.

Some of the top leading email archive applications today, have existed for over 10 years. Email archiving is not a new fad that is simply going to go away. It has become a major requirement for messaging infrastructures and an expectation to be deployed in the top Fortune 5000+ companies whether they are a financial industry regulated company or not. The latest analyst reports indicate that there are over 25,000 deployments of enterprise email archives in the world and is still one of the fastest growing market segments for enterprise software and storage.

So if email archiving is nothing "new" and is deployed in the top accounts across the globe, how can it be transforming. The transformation comes from the constant change in the market; archiving vendors get acquired: OTG to Legato to EMC, KVS to Veritas to Symantec, Educom to Zantaz to Atonomy, Persist (spun off from Zantaz) to HP, and more. These are some of the top deployed archiving applications in the world and they are changing ownership, adding features and improving their products. So if the vendors are constantly making changes, how could it be assumed that customers would not?

End users are constantly changing their minds about what they want and need. Maybe it's because a really good sales person convinced them they need their product, or they are sick of supporting an end user that always complains about some feature not working or that simply does not exist within their current product. So what are these customers doing? They are making changes. They are changing their archiving applications.

These changes that we are seeing in the market is nothing new for technology. As products and solutions improve, customers want their environment to improve as well. Customers make changes for all reasons good and bad; cost, features, functions, storage management, political, 'cause there is a cool button' and more.

The email archiving market is transforming. It's transforming from a rich green field of opportunities that all you had to do was throw a few lawn darts and wherever they landed was your next million dollar archiving sale. To today where the opportunities exist, but the field is already full of paying customers on competitive platforms. Tomorrow's customers were the competitor's customer 1,3,5 years ago. Opportunity exists in these 25,000+ accounts for vendors to sell them their solution. Customers have already determined that they need an archiving product. Vendors just need to convince the customers that their product is best for them now and that migrating the data will magically happen.

End users need to ask themselves if their product is the best for them. If not, now is the time to determine which product is. We've proven that these archives are not going away anytime soon. The archive market is transforming. Is your vendor helping you get to where you want to be?