South Africa`s e-mail archiving sector is expected to mirror the international trend with a compound annual growth rate of more than 50% for the next several years, says research group BMI-TechKnowledge (BMI-T).
BMI-T director Mark Walker says growth for the market is being driven by legislative factors, such as the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA), which came into effect last year.
Walker`s comment dovetails with research recently carried out by BMI-T`s US principle International Data Corporation (IDC), which said today that e-mail archiving applications revenue is expected to top $180 million (R1.098 billion) worldwide in 2004, compared with $33 million (R199 million) two years ago, and will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more that 50% through 2008.
"Demand will continue to be driven by the explosive growth in email and other electronic records, the increased regulatory environment and focus on corporate governance, and the need to respond to urgent litigation and discovery requests," the IDC study says.
"Organisations now more than ever have a much greater obligation than before to ensure that their email is retained in its original state without being altered, viewed, or deleted by unauthorized people," says Julie Rahal Marobella, senior research analyst, Information Management for Compliance at IDC.
Marobella says that as a result, email archiving has emerged as a crucial piece of a comprehensive, sustainable strategy for corporate compliance, corporate governance, and risk management.
Walker says that while the SA market is still taking off, there has been a lot of interest shown by financial and legal companies.
"Many are still in the process of evaluating systems. Money has not been spent in big numbers yet, but it will," he says.
The IDC study also says that mergers and acquisitions involving e-mail archiving, storage software, and content management vendors are transforming the landscape of this emerging market.
"Vendors must find the most appealing and efficient way to address both urgent near-term and important long-term customer needs for automating the increasingly important business process of archiving content in internal and external e-mail communications," IDC says.
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