"It's a whole new architecture for integrating multiple kinds of archiving," said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer of content management and archiving at EMC. "The old school of archiving application by application is on its way to death."
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SourceOne consists of a single management layer that spans products for e-mail management, as well as compliance and e-discovery, Tidmarsh said. EMC SourceOne E-mail Management archives Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes messages, as well as instant messages. SourceOne Discovery Manager can find, hold, cull, and produce archived e-mail when legal or regulatory notice calls for it, the company said. SourceOne Discovery Collector, meanwhile, is a complementary offering for automating data collection, identification, and preservation of unstructured content.
Tidmarsh said customers can reduce storage costs. For example, a company with 1,000 e-mail inboxes can save $1 million in hardware and software costs with one year, she said.
However, IDC Research Director for Storage Software Laura DuBois pointed out that every company is different, as is the ROI they may or may not achieve and how long a return might take to achieve. "Depending on the environment, customers can get as much as 30 to 40 percent savings in storage with e-mail archiving," DuBois said. "That's not something to sneeze at."
DuBois added that while earlier adoptions of archiving and e-discovery software focused on compliance, "now we're seeing companies use the software for optimizing e-mail." In addition to storage costs, the software can boost e-mail performance and cut the necessary backup window.
EMC, of course, said the new software makes a good combination with its own storage hardware, but SourceOne will also run on competitors' systems, Tidmarsh added.
"This is just the beginning," she said. "We all know e-discovery doesn't start and stop with e-mail."
EMC intends to build out the SourceOne line with products for SharePoint archiving, XML and data archiving, and file archiving later this year and into 2010, Tidmarsh added.