ICL has been appointed as Africa`s strategic channel development partner for Enterprise Vault, a software solution from KVS that provides content archiving solutions for Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint.
KVS is the global market leaders in email archiving with the largest customer base and more than one million licences sold.
"Enterprise Vault is already recognised as the only logical choice for e-mail archiving on the Microsoft platform," explained Kethan Parbhoo, business unit manager for ICL`s Solutions Business division. "It enables companies to efficiently protect and access unstructured corporate information while retaining its relevant context."
ICL will in turn appoint resellers operating in specific vertical markets. "Essentially customers will have access to this solution through a variety of partners who will be chosen based on their knowledge of Microsoft technologies, their skills base and customer focus," he explained.
"Unstructured corporate information continues to increase significantly. When all this content is unprotected or improperly managed, critical communications are lost or become a risk to the enterprise. It protects all the corporation`s unstructured information and in doing so, protects the corporation itself," he said.
Parbhoo said market acceleration is being fuelled by the increasing focus on regulatory compliance, including the management and archiving of e-mail communications, combined with the ever-increasing pressure to reduce the cost of storage associated with e-mail. Enterprise Vault solutions not only enable structured reviews of internal e-mail for a company`s own internal audit purposes, and handle requests for historical e-mail as part of legal discovery in lawsuits, but also provide 'unlimited` mailboxes by storing and indexing e-mails offline and eliminating expensive storage solutions and unwanted e-mail quotas.
"Corporate governance, regulatory compliance transparency, auditing and disclosure have catapulted e-mail onto the management agenda of most major organisations," noted Parbhoo.
"This, combined with the continuing focus on cost reduction and ROI, is motivating decision-makers to look at how e-mail is managed."
The software works on the basis of moving items out of Exchange into online Vault stores, optionally leaving pointer files behind from which users can easily view or restore the original items.
Enterprise Vault stores electronic mail messages in such a way that they can be recovered as usable messages exactly as they were before being moved from Exchange, with all their properties and attachments intact.
The software is designed to be capable of scaling to meet the requirements of large enterprises consisting of many tens of thousands of users generating correspondingly large volumes of data and wishing to keep that data for several years. It reliably stores high volumes of electronic information, and simultaneously allows the information to be searched and retrieved easily by end-users. As organisations grow, the product configuration can grow to meet increasing workloads.
An important aspect of its scalability is that administrative load does not need to increase as the product deployment grows. Once set up, the archiving process happens automatically and multiple Vault systems can be administered from one Microsoft Management Console. It is possible to define central policies for the control of the service, without needing to explicitly set up every supported mail system and mailbox. Administrators can control the degree to which users are allowed to override the site settings and manage their own policies.
Typically Enterprise Vault is deployed on a dedicated NT/Windows 2000 server and supports multiple Exchange systems. It stores items in NTFS files and so will work with any conformant storage solution including magnetic or optical disks, SAN or NAS solutions, and HSM products. It is totally non-invasive on the Exchange installation.
To find out more about Enterprise Vault and/or the partner programme, contact Kethan Parbhoo on (011) 233 5468.
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ICL South Africa, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Services Plc (Formerly ICL Plc), is one of the leading IT services companies in Europe, Middle East and Africa. It has an annual turnover of lb2.4 billion (EUR3.9 billion), employs 15 500 people and operates in over 30 countries. It designs, builds and operates IT systems and services for customers in the financial services, telecoms, retail, utilities and government markets. Its core strength is the delivery of IT infrastructure management and outsourcing across desktop, networking and data centre environments, together with a full range of related services, from infrastructure consulting through integration and deployment.
Headquartered in London, Fujitsu Services is the European-centred IT services arm of the Fujitsu Group. The Fujitsu Group is a $38 billion (about EUR43 billion) leader in customer-focused IT systems and services for the global marketplace.
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