GFI’s Email Archiving: Snapshot

GFI sells a variety of tools, one of which is MailArchiver for Exchange.

Summary of Capabilities

• Customer-installed archiving for MS Exchange.
• Available since December 2004.

Illustrative Pricing

• $324 for 25 seats; $1,296 for 200 seats; $4,320 for 500 seats; $3,780 for 1,000 seats.
• After first year, maintenance is 20% of purchase price.
• For details, go here.

Main Types of Prospective Customer

• U.S. and U.K.: Customers mainly driven by compliance and legal discovery.
• Rest of world: Storage management is the driver; mailbox size reduction and better performance.
• U.S. is getting a lot of interest from schools.
• Typical customer has 200 to 250 seats.
• H250 customers with over 1,000 seats; about 30 of them have 5,000+ seats.
• Also many small customers with 50 or so seats.

Competition

• At high end: Symantec Enterprise Vault.
• At SME end: Highly fragmented; perhaps the main one is Barracuda Message Archiver.

Competitive Strengths as Perceived by Company

• Reasonable functionality for extremely competitive price.
• Much easier to install and maintain than Symantec.
• Strong multilanguage support.

Finances

• Ferris Research estimates current revenues at about $10M annually for GFI's archiving products.
• GFI as a whole did $60M in calendar 2007.

Challenges

• Hosted archiving: Very easy to install and cheap to operate.
• Product's focus is on email; it will need to add support for other types of information, whether in motion or at rest.

Miscellaneous Comments

• V6, out in September 2008, will have Outlook support via a plug-in. Hitherto, archive access has been via a Web browser.

... David Ferris