Thursday, March 1, 2007

ZipLip is Number 1, this is why.

Email archiving is a rapidly growing industry. It is not just for the wealthy companies that are under scrutiny by the SEC, NASD, DoJ, Attourney General, etc. Now more than ever investors, employees, stockholders, hedge funds, private equity companies, competitors, and the general public are analyzing companies to the core to protect their interests. Archiving companies need to be flexible.

They need to be omni-agnostic; this means that they cannot specialize on servers; storage; email platform; existing applications, industry, or philosophy. By philosophy I mean whether you want something held in house, hosted, or as an appliance that can be rolled and and turn-key operated.

ZipLip is the only archiving vendor that I have seen that does this, hands down. If I am wrong, let me know, because if someone else is out there and can compete with ZipLip in this market, you need to fire your marketing person and get someone else who knows what they are doing.

2 comments:

Sean Regan said...

I think another way to look at his might be combine your archive, IM and anti-spam much like Symantec has done with their Information Foundation Suite. It is nice that Ziplip has three different versions but the benefit to the customer isn't huge. It makes it easy to sell because it will appeal to every customer large or small in some way.

I would argue that being able to:
1: Integrate you anti-spam content filtering with your archive to prevent archiving junk or inappropriate email
2: Store, search and discover IM at the same time as email using the same tools.
3: Purchase, deploy, integrate and operate all your messaging infrastructure from end to end with one vendor and possibly one admin (depending on your size)

are a far better options to the customer than choosing between an appliance, S/W or SAAS for a point archiving product.

Chris Foreman said...

this proposal is somewhat true in theory, however a few acquisitions and consolidation does not convert to "integration". It does not matter if your AV/AS products integrate with your archive. The archiving system has no insight (nor does it need it) into what is not allowed into the company, if the filter let's it in, great, it can be archived. I don't see any added value to having your spam provider being the same as your archive provider other than getting one invoice.

Also, with regards to Symantec's "integration" between IM Manager and Enterprise Vault; the IM's that are stored by IMM must be dumped into a ghost mailbox in order to make them searchable by the Enterprise Vault search tool or Discovery Accelerator. Any IM system can dump its content into any archiving system, this is not integration, it is a band-aid and the two systems are not tied together. Also the search tool in EV is Altavista, or at least is was in previous releases. This third party tool cannot be adjusted to fit the clients needs, they are stuck with what they get. ZipLip can customize the search tool to include or delete customer specific criteria, I think that is advantageous for the customer, not the sales rep necessarily. Additionally the policy management piece in the information foundation layer was OEMed from Orchestria.

So, my point is that, yes, in theory it may seem that things are "integrated" and there is only one vendor sending you an invoice but in reality, you have 3 very different products that are not integrated that are using the technology provided by third parties to run their technology, which in effect makes support and customization a total nightmare. ZipLip owns the IP around their entire system. If you have a problem, you can choke their throat, they won't pass the buck, and if I'm a customer who is running a 24 hour operation and I need answers right away, I'm choosing ZipLip.