Sept. 1st, 2004
By Melanie Turek, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research LLC

Two mergers this week highlight the growing need for compliance-ready messaging technology. Managed e-mail security provider, FrontBridge Technologies Inc., will acquire message-archiving company, MessageRite Inc., which focuses on e-mail and instant-messaging archiving. And Veritas Software plans to acquire KVS, which sells software for storing and retrieving e-mail and instant messages, as well as unstructured data in SharePoint Portal Server and file-server environments.

Although the two announcements may sound similar, they’re really very different. Both recognize the value—which Nemertes has long been touting—of managing e-mail and instant messaging so that they’re compliant with regulations and legal-discovery needs (not to mention corporate and/or industry policy). But one is messaging-centric (FrontBridge is a secure-messaging managed service provider), while the other is data-centric (Veritas focuses on data and applications management in support of utility computing).

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Chris Zimmerman at christine@nemertes.com