Once again the importance of archiving email is revealed in the recent scandal involving tainted peanut butter and the executive who issued orders to ship peanut products that tested positive for salmonella. See, for example, this Wall Street Journal article. Internal company emails were examined by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reveal the truth.

The article underscores the importance of archiving email for its business content. For matters of business content, intellectual property, and as a record of written statements made by employees, all companies must adopt an email policy for retention and consider carefully how they will respond to investigations and requests for email records. An email archival solution is designed to retain email and make it accessible for quick search and discovery.

… Bob Spurzem

We’ve just heard about Mailprotector, an in-the-cloud email threat control service. Main features are:

• Spam control
• Virus, phishing, malware control
• Policy and compliance enforcement
• Data loss prevention
• Encryption–inbound and outbound via TLS
• Availability and continuity
• Hosted messaging and collaboration

Pricing varies from around $4/user/month down to $0.65/user/month, depending on volumes.

Mailprotector does around $2M/year in revenues, and has been in existence since 2002. The business is obviously very small compared to the established market leaders such as Google/Postini, Symantec/MessageLabs, and MX Logic. Mailprotector feels its main strengths include ease of use, good accessibility to technical support, and easy contractual terms. Its main focus is on SMBs.

Overall thought: If this company has good technology, then probably the best thing would be for it to sell through OEM partners, and perhaps be acquired by a major one that can give it good leverage.

… David Ferris

With cloud computing evolving rapidly, a number of vendors have taken the systems management model into the cloud. One of these is San Francisco-based Tap In Systems. It is one of the first vendors we’re aware of making use of the virtual servers (called “instances” in Amazon Web Services speak) in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure to address on-premises and cloud-based systems management.

Similarly, another Bay Area company, Hyperic, provides solutions to monitor your apps wherever they are located, and has also built out a free dashboard called CloudStatus to report on availability of Google Apps and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We expect this to be the leading edge of a multiyear transition of traditional systems management solutions over to the cloud. Similar trends are already under way in the archiving arena (e.g., LiveOffice, Postini, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services) and e-discovery markets (e.g., CaseCentral, CT Summation).

The question, of course, is when and how fast will the transition happen? If you have thoughts or early experiences on any of this, we’d love to hear from you!

… David Sengupta