Email archiving can be implemented by subscribing to a hosted service, commonly called “software as a service” (SaaS), or by licensing software and installing it in-house. Which approach is better? Sometimes the choice is clear; more often it is not, and a potential customer must balance trade-offs.

This Ferris Research white paper explains the main differences between the two approaches so IT executives can decide which is best for their organizations. It also contains an interview with Mimecast, a SaaS provider, on the advantages of SaaS and how it is evolving.

This report looks at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Microsoft-based UC. As the report shows, the TCO of Microsoft UC and telephony benefits from economies of scale. It is much easier for a large organization to justify the technology than a smaller organization. A spreadsheet to help you model your organization’s TCO is also provided.

On October 8, 2008, Symantec announced its intention to acquire MessageLabs. This is our assessment of the transaction.

On June 24, 2008, Proofpoint announced that it bought Fortiva. This report looks at the purchase and its implications.

On August 12, 2008, Return Path announced that it will buy Habeas. This report looks at the purchase and its implications.

On July 31, 2008, Synchronica announced that it had secured an additional round of £5.1 million of funding. This report looks at the transaction and its implications.

On August 18, 2008, mobile email vendor Synchronica announced that it will buy mobile email vendor AxisMobile. This report looks at the purchase and its implications.

On July 31, 2008, McAfee announced that it will buy Reconnex. The deal closed on August 14, 2008. This report looks at the purchase and its implications. It is designed to help CEOs and business development staff understand how to optimize stock price, successful vs. failed sales strategies, and rationales for funding-raising and sales.

This report describes the results of a survey of 136 organizations, totaling about 1.5 million mailboxes, to determine the extent that organizations have deployed their email vendor’s instant messaging (IM) services. We discuss the penetration of the vendors’ IM services for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise, and further break down the data based on organization size. The data is valuable for organizations that want to compare the size and cost of their email support staffs with those of comparably sized organizations, as well as for vendors seeking to assess the penetration of internally supported IM technology.

This report looks at Ensim Unify, a system management framework that offers a layer of insulation, protecting the management of mission-critical infrastructure applications—such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory (AD), and mobility gateways such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and Windows Mobile. The key idea behind Unify is to automate the day-to-day administration of these applications by wrapping their administrator interfaces so it can bundle sets of commands into single, task-focused operations.

This report describes the results of a survey of 136 organizations, totaling about 1.5 million mailboxes, to determine the size and cost of their email support staffs. We discuss the annual cost per mailbox of providing technical support for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise, and further break down the data based on organization size. The data is valuable for organizations that want to compare the size and cost of their email support staffs with those of comparably sized organizations.

Kazeon’s Information Access Platform discovers, classifies, and indexes most of an organization’s electronically stored information (ESI) and then makes it easy to search for relevant information sets and apply control policies. This report describes Kazeon’s offering and details its industry context.

A growing proportion of lawsuits require the production of copies of electronically stored information. IT staff must now provide timely assistance in producing the data. This new responsibility is typically extremely disruptive to IT staff, and also very expensive. This report reviews the state of current U.S. federal laws relating to electronic discovery, explains the problems that have arisen, and summarizes current thinking on relevant best practices. We focus on the perspective of IT staff and the actions they should undertake.

This report describes the results of a survey of 917 organizations of all sizes to determine the email systems they are using, the versions deployed, migration plans, and the cost of the software. Responding organizations account for 10.6 million employees, or roughly 2% of the workforce in developed industrialized economies.

This special package features four Ferris reports on the state of electronic information archiving. The reports cover Key Laws and Regulations, Purchase Motivations and Product Selection Criteria, Best Practices, and Recent Product Announcements.