Despite the rise of instant messaging, social networks and many other forms of collaboration and information sharing, e-mail continues to be a mission-critical tool for businesses and government organizations. E-mail retention, search and retrieval for compliance and legal purposes continue to be major issues for all industries and organizations of every size. Additionally, as e-mail volumes increase, administrators struggle to meet service level performance metrics while providing end-users with sufficient access to older e-mail messages. This report analyzes customer behaviors, decision drivers and future plans specifically related to e-mail archiving processes and tools. In undertaking this study, ESG continues a line of ongoing research that began in 2002. The most recent quantitative study in this area, Digital Archiving: End-User Survey and Market Forecast 2006-2010, was published in January 2006. In that study, ESG focused on understanding customer appetites for specialized digital archiving solutions as well as purchase decision drivers, top priority features and attributes, organizational issues and sourcing strategies. Specifically, this report looks to answer the following questions:

• To what extent are small, medium and enterprise-class organizations operating or planning to deploy digital archiving processes and technologies for e-mail?
• What factors have the greatest impact in customers’ choices of e-mail archiving strategies?
• At what rate is the use of these processes and technologies growing? What are the key factors driving that growth?
• Which types of processes and tools (e.g. purpose-built, native, manual or other types of solutions) are used most widely to support e-mail archiving requirements? How will this mix of tools change over time?
• What are the most likely timelines and decision drivers for customers making new investments in purpose-built archiving solutions for e-mail?
• What are the most commonly used policies governing e-mail retention and archiving?
• What are the net growth rates for e-mail archive storage capacity?
• What types of storage media are used to support e-mail archiving?
• What types of features and functions will be required in future solutions?

To answer these questions, ESG conducted an online survey of 441 North American IT decision makers representing a cross section of industries and organization sizes. Of the 441 respondents, 156 respondents were most familiar with their organization’s information retention policies, procedures and technologies with respect to e-mail. For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

Executive Summary

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