|
online storage services are proliferating and becoming more diverse. While backup is the driving force for the market, services like email archiving, disaster recovery and primary storage are beginning to hop on the bandwagon--especially archiving.
"The majority of activity that's happened in the marketplace, it's been on the backup side," says Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group, Hopkinton, MA. "That's the No. 1 place where SaaS [storage as a service] has been successful."
That's starting to change. Non-backup-related products like Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), Hewlett Packard's online services and Atempo's digital archiving product are making headway in the market.
Email archiving, for one, is beginning to explode. "Email archiving is a hot, hot trend because email has become a common person's repository," says Taneja.
Home users and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) now make up the bulk of SaaS customers. Still, larger organizations seem to be catching on quickly, especially with email archiving. And many public companies need to adhere to compliance laws, and keep emails for ediscovery matters.
Archiving vendors are staking their claims. EMC announced in April plans to offer archiving SaaS. Mark Lewis, president of EMC's content management and archiving division, and Howard Shao, founder of Documentum and now EMC's senior VP of enterprise content management and archiving, told SearchStorage.com they'll offer some service online and some offline. EMC plans to update Documentum by the end of this year. Part of that effort will comprise the Documentum Archive product, which will combine data archives from several apps, including email, files and databases.
Also bringing storage online is Symantec. "For a lot of reasons, storage is on the forefront, and online is a very intuitive way of doing it," says Chris Schin, senior director of product management for Symantec's Protection Network, which hosts customer servers, manages software and stores user data offsite in a redundant data center for disaster recovery. "There's no question there's a strong and growing market need," he says.
|
