In our most recent report, E-mail Archiving & Management (EAM), we struggled early on in the research process to differentiate in a meaningful way among the vendors in this sector. It was a good struggle to have, as it turned out that through our research we found few buyers or even other analyst sources had tried to categorize this sector either.

Like all markets, EAM can be sliced and diced in various ways, but as a starting point to buyers I tend to suggest first subdividing the vendors between those that are Policy-centric and those that are Archiving-centric. And of course figure out which particular category has more appeal and fit for your particular organization.

The Policy-centric vendors we evaluate in the report are those that offer the most advanced and sophisticated functions to provide records management-style capabilities to e-mail. Most typically these vendors sell into larger enterprises and government departments. As such you'll find them at the higher end in terms of cost and complexity to deploy, configure, and run. This higher cost and complexity is justified for customers in heavily regulated environments or any enterprise that needs to closely monitor e-mail content. It is also justified for those trying to filter out non-business related mails, archiving only true records. Vendors we consider to be in this category include CA, Open Text, and Symantec.

Archiving-centric vendors, just like their policy-centric competitors, sell mainly into larger enterprise or government markets. Though most of them provide some kind of policy management capabilities, their real appeal lies in their approach to archive optimization. These vendors tend to market more to the IT buyer than the business buyer, as their approach centers on backing up and actively archiving mail servers to maximize server and storage optimization.

In some cases vendors accomplish this through novel and unique hardware and storage arrangements (Mimosa, ZL, and HP); others approach it through a deep and long understanding of broad archiving requirements (AXS-One and EMC).

Of all the technologies we evaluate EAM is arguably the most difficult for a buyer to compare options side by side. But sometimes just some simple slicing and dicing can help the process.