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The technologies that are helping organisations confront the email management headache head on.
Yesterday over 35 billion emails were sent and received around the globe; by this time next year another 5 billion will be hitting mailboxes daily.
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As individuals have come to depend on the speed, reliability and borderless nature of email, it has become the preferred form of business communication. Indeed, a recent survey by the Meta Group found that 80% of business people choose to use email rather than the phone even for internal communication.
But that universal adoption has thrown up some major challenges for IT management.
Email is soaking up corporate bandwidth and consuming vast volumes of storage - and those many terabytes are growing at over 60% a year, according to storage industry group SNIA. Organisations are under legal and regulatory pressures to archive more and more email - in some cases for a few years, in others for decades. Email security is also a major concern, as the need to protect against email-borne viruses and other malicious code, and demand for emails to be protected using encryption grows. At the same time, IT managers need to enforce email policies that ensure compliance with legal and human resources issues that stems from the circulation of inappropriate content.
Growing burden
That translates into a hefty cost per user. According to industry research by Gartner, spend on email management at large companies is running at around $1,600 per user per year. The email management burden has also given rise to a whole ecosystem of software and services companies whose products are designed to eliminate at least some of the associated pain, cost and risk.
While most of these vendors have traditionally tackled one or a couple of aspects of email management, customer are now asking for more comprehensive email management suites - something that has triggered a rush of consolidation.
Today, says Meta, because the email management industry is made up of many small, niche suppliers, organisations are being forced to stitch together a portfolio of technologies from multiple vendors. Over the next four years, all that will change as the sector consolidates around six to nine large vendors each offering a broad range of email management services (see box, The future of email management).
A handful of examples underscore the move. In the last year, systems and security management software vendor NetIQ has acquired Marshal Software with its MailMarshal email filtering, monitoring and encryption tools and also bought PentaSafe, a specialist in policy management software; NetIQ's rival Network Associates has snapped up Spam Assassin with its acquisition of Deersoft; and email security software company ClearSwift has added Baltimore Technologies' MimeSweeper and PornSweeper content filtering packages.
But acquisitions elsewhere are also closely related to the growth of email, including storage market leader EMC's takeover of back-up and archiving specialist Legato, which offers EmailXtender, a policy-based system that automatically collects, organises, retains and retrieves email messages and attachments; and content management software vendor Documentum has bought archiving and retrieval software specialist TrueArc.
Regulation-driven
As that points to, email archiving and retrieval has become one of the fastest growing segments as email messages have become the most prevalent document and record type.
Specialist in this area include KVS and Ixos, but with greater pressure to retain email records, the larger content management companies such as Documentum, FileNet and iManage have added modules to their existing offerings to address that requirement.
Traditional archiving packages have simply written emails to disk, tape and optical storage, but increasingly that does not provide the kind of audit trail regulatory authorities are demanding.
One vendor tackling this issue is EMC. Its Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system has been specifically developed for records or 'fixed content'.
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Systems overload
Securely retaining important emails is one pressing problem that IT staff can tackle directly; getting rid of or blocking unsolicited email is a very different challenge. The issues surrounding such 'spam' are well-documented. With over 30% of corporate email now spam, the inflow is soaking up corporate bandwidth and wasting staff time; the possibility of spam carrying viruses or other malicious code makes is a serious security threat; email is also the primary source by which offensive material enters the organisation, something that employers need (by law in some countries) to protect their staff against.
Although demand for a solution to the spam avalanche gave rise to a clutch of specialist tools for screening emails and their content and deciding if they were spam, in many cases these are now part of wider suites that include anti-virus and email policy management functionality.
Indeed, most of the large vendors of security software are now trying to address this onslaught with software or services that act as a filtering gateway that scans and removes spam. However, according industry insiders, while spam is of great interest to corporate boardrooms at the moment, it will not necessarily be the overriding concern for very long.
"There are a lot of companies that are focusing on spam at the moment, but in 18 months this will not be the major issue," says Andy Burton, senior vice president at electronic content security company Clearswift. Burton suggests that companies that focus solely on spam blocking will find it hard to broaden out their portfolios, and will need to add clarification and analysis facilities to remain viable within a consolidating industry (see table, 'Top email concerns'). That optimism partly stems from various government initiatives in Europe and the US which aim to make spamming an offence unless the user has 'opted in' to the service.
Email content tasting is being applied in a more constructive way elsewhere. Many organisations find themselves swamped by another kind of email - customer enquiries. The solution here has been to apply knowledge-based systems to the content to categorise the enquiry and to route it to the most appropriate service representative or, in some cases where the query is a common one, to answer it with a pre-determined response.
Among the companies offering such services are RightNow Technologies and Transversal. Both have developed web self-service products which utilise knowledge-based systems to enable
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RightNow customer, easyCar implemented the eService Centre system in November 2000 on a hosted basis. The company claims that prior to its introduction 95% of email customer requests were taking an unacceptable seven days to get answered. Within a month of its introduction, 95% of enquiries were being answered within 24 hours. Other customers have had a similar experience, including Polaroid and William Hill.
As that illustrates, organisations are increasingly turning to hosted or managed email services for many facets of their email management. Though outsourced email services have not, in all cases, proven that they provide substantive reduction in costs, having email management handled by a specialist company does reduce the burden on internal IT departments and administrators. And given the unstoppable growth of email traffic, organisations need to take whatever opportunities they can find to lighten that management burden.
