Arcserve LLC plans to add an email archiving solution to its Arcserve UDP portfolio of data protection offerings.
Called Arcserve UDP Archiving and scheduled to reach market late May or early June, the system is based on technology developed by FastArchiver, an email archiving startup that Minneapolis-based Arcserve acquired during the first quarter of the year. Terms of that deal were not disclosed.
Target customers for the new solution are mid-market businesses whose limited IT staff lack archiving expertise, according to Erica Antony, Arcserve’s vice president of product management.
“They’re wearing many hats and don’t have the luxury of specializing in every piece of their environment,” she says, adding that Arcserve UDP Archiving is designed to be an easy product for them to deploy and use.
The system also helps businesses make more efficient use of their onsite and cloud-based email servers by offloading older messages to a separate storage repository, even as it equips them to meet e-discovery requirements and comply with email retention regulations more effectively.
Key features of Arcserve UDP Archiving include compatibility with Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, and IBM Domino, among other email platforms, as well as the ability to perform full-text searches in multiple languages and save or export searches.
Variable access privileges enable organizations to let end users recover messages from their own account on a self-serve basis, provided those emails were sent or received through a web interface or a copy of Microsoft Outlook equipped with a special plug-in. Attorneys and auditors, meanwhile, can be given more expansive rights, and technicians can receive control over access rights and management policies or comprehensive superuser status.
According to Antony, Arcserve UDP Archiving gives resellers who already offer Arcserve UDP a simple way to collect incremental product revenue from customers already buying data protection services from them.
“It’s just such a nice sales motion for our partners,” Antony says.
Arcserve UDP Archiving will ship in software format initially, with a hardware-based appliance version arriving roughly a quarter later. Both perpetual and subscription-based licensing will be available at rates that Arcserve is still finalizing.
Arcserve chose to buy rather than build an email archiving application largely for the faster time-to-market that approach made possible.
It opted to purchase FastArchiver specifically because its software met an extensive list of selection criteria, including support for Office 365, ease of deployment both on premises or in the cloud, and robust functionality. The system is also based on a multi-tenant architecture that makes it an option for service providers looking for a solution they can use to offer email archiving to multiple clients.
Arcserve decided to add an email archiving solution to its product lineup in response to requests for such a tool from resellers, who identified archiving as an underserved need in the IT marketplace.
“When we asked them where should we invest and how do you want us to build our product. They told us ‘give me email archiving,'” says vice president of product marketing Christophe Bertrand.
The new solution will be “loosely integrated” with Arcserve UDP upon launch, according to Antony, with tighter integration to follow in ensuing releases. Arcserve plans to add the ability to archive files, databases, and social media messages to future versions as well.
Arcserve first introduced UDP roughly 2 and half years ago. Version 6.5, the most recent edition, shipped in January. New bookings for the solution grew 43 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2016, according to Bertrande, who notes that the FastArchiver acquisition is Arcserve’s first since CA Inc. sold the company to a private equity group in 2014. Additional buyouts are likely to come, he adds.
“It’s been our stated strategy, and we’ve mentioned in the past we’re looking at organic growth and non-organic growth,” Bertrande says.
