Vendors Unite to Offer E-mail Archiving Solutions

Following on the heels of recently levied million-dollar fines for several financial-services firms charged with not fully complying with regulatory requirements for e-mail retention and storage, three vendors have joined forces to offer integrated solutions for e-mail archiving. EMC, Iron Mountain and KVS have formed a technology alliance to combine elements of each of their product lines to offer a complete solution for the financial-services industry.

The integrated solution brings together EMC's Centera content-address-storage system, KVS' Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange and Iron Mountain's Designated Third Party Services. "The three of us seemed to be in a lot of accounts together so we decided to put the components together and form this technical alliance to make it easier for customers to meet regulatory-compliance requirements," explains Mary Kay Roberto, vice president, North America at KVS.

More specifically, the combined solution taps e-mail mailbox management and compliance supervision from KVS, long-term e-mail archiving, indexing and Designated Third Party Services from Iron Mountain and long-term, compliant online storage media from EMC.

The integrated solution can also be customized according to end-user needs, hosted either on site of off-site as a service bureau. "We realized this technology integration was already going on individually and that each of these components came together to form a solution," adds Roy Sanford, vice president of markets and alliances for content-addressed storage at EMC.

By offering the integrated solution, the three companies were also looking to save customers time and resources, says Margaret Rimmler, vice president of marketing for digital archives at Iron Mountain. "The customers don't have to do all of the work themselves -- going to three vendors with three RFPs and three decision processes," she adds.

Pricing for the combined solution will be dependent on the level of usage and the specific technology components required, says Sanford. The solution is generally available this week for new customers, as well as existing customers who will be revisited and offered the packaged solution.