Management software firm Computer Associates International Inc. has joined the crowded and emerging e-mail archiving market with the purchase of iLumin Software Services Inc. The acquisition positions CA to add archiving and security to its BrightStor storage management tool.
iLumin is known primarily for its Assentor product line, which archives unstructured data forms such as e-mail and instant messages and supports Lotus Notes, Exchange and GroupWise. An April 2005 Gartner Inc. survey gave iLumin a nearly 20% share in the e-mail archiving market, and the company claims to manage more than 40 billion e-mails a year.
iLumin will be run within CA's storage management business unit.
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In a product roadmap released shortly after the acquisition, CA indicated that iLumin would be integrated with CA's backup, hierarchical storage management (HRM) and storage resource management (SRM) tools in the first half of 2006, while integration with CA's security management tool eTrust and operations management software Unicenter is due by the end of next year.
New data compliance regulations and high-profile legal cases centering on lax data retention have set the stage for rapid growth in e-mail archiving. Research firm The Radicati Group Inc. predicts that 330 million mailboxes will be archived by 2009, an increase from just 21 million mailboxes today.
Along with iLumin, major players in the e-mail archiving space include CommonVault, EMC, Zantaz and the recently merged Symantec and Veritas.