The E-Mail Archiving Services Spin

Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at Open Systems Solutions, Willow Grove, Pa., on e-mail archiving service opportunities:

IT'S ALL SERVICES: I like to think that if we've seen the opportunity, we've turned it into a service.

WHERE THE SERVICES SPRING FROM: Initially, a lot of companies know their e-mail systems, whether its Exchange or Notes or whatever, are essentially out of control. This means their e-mail space is never enough. But IT people want to keep users' space to a minimum. This is for several reasons. First, with the cost of disk, you can't let space keep growing. Second is retention policies, because a lot of companies have regulatory concerns. The third is issues with duplicate e-mails.

ASSESS CUSTOMER NEEDS: The first service is to assess the customer's e-mail use. Find the size of their e-mails, and know who the power users are. Typically, the marketing department has a lot of attachments. And executives seem to think of e-mail as their filing system. You have to look all over the corporation.

FIND THE PST FILES: A lot of users use PSTs to back up their individual e-mails. Typically, this is against company policy. If the policy is to retain e-mails for only 90 or 180 days, the PST is in violation of company rules. And the PST files get backed up and take up disk space.

SET LIMITS: Work with the IT department to set limits on users, including number of e-mails or space allocated, depending on the customer's retention policy.

SET UP THE E-MAIL ARCHIVING SOFTWARE: The last major service opportunity is to go in and set up the e-mail archiving software so that it complies with the policies and strategies of the customer's IT department. This includes going in and clearing off all the PST files scattered around the organization. This can be a big job. If a company has 4,000 e-mail boxes, that can mean several thousands of PST files on desktops and workstations.

MIXED SERVICES REVENUE: The services revenue mix depends on customer size. For smaller organizations, we've used assessment as a loss leader to get the hardware and software business. For larger companies, services can be 30 percent to 35 percent of the total revenue.

PARTNERING: It depends on the customer and how strong their consul is. We've partnered with law firms that specialize in compliance. Where there is a huge opportunity to partner is when there's litigation.