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As the figures show, the opportunities are ripe for cloud providers

 

A computer engineer named Raymond Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971. Apparently, no one remembers what was in it. Little did he know, he was the pioneer trendsetter of a global communications phenomenon.

There’s been rather a lot of email correspondence since then. According to market researchers Radicati, in 2018, about 124.5 billion business emails are sent and received each day. Radicati foresees the number rising to 128.8 billion per day in 2019.

That’s a load of information to remember. Much of it is business-critical data. So organisations are looking for ways to keep it – not only because they want it for their own future reference but also because, increasingly, government and industry regulations say they must store it securely.

No wonder email archiving solutions are in demand – and not just any solution. Customers want one that’s:

  • compliant to meet all regulations
  • easily scalable
  • capable of deleting data, in line with GDPR
  • quick to retrieve emails for eDiscovery and Subject Access Request (SAR) and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests
  • cloud-based, as there are over 1 billion (and rising) business cloud email accounts

Are you seizing the opportunity to provide email archiving as a service to your customers? Just to whet your appetite, here are some more interesting facts, figures, and predictions:

  • Email archiving generated $4.9 billion in revenue in 2015, and is expected to grow by 15% by 2019, to $5.6 billion. (Radicati)
  • The number of email users worldwide is expected to grow to over 4.2 billion by the end of 2022. Over half of the world population now uses email. (Radicati)
  • Growth in the number of email accounts around the world continues to outpace growth in the number of email users. (Radicati)
  • 85% of people surveyed in a US report, which included Generation Z (born 1996-2010) participants, believe that their email usage will stay the same or increase in the next 5 years. (The Future of Digital Communications, SendGrid + eggstrategyTM).

The cloud services market

As more business moves to the cloud, the opportunities to sell SaaS email archiving solutions increase. Currently:

  • Overall cloud adoption rate stands at 84% (cloudindustryforum.org)
  • The enterprise SaaS market is now generating $20B in quarterly revenues for software vendors, a number that is growing by 32% per year. Microsoft is in the lead with a worldwide market share of over 17% (Forbes)
  • By the end of 2018, spending on IT-as-a-Service for data centres, software and services will be $547B (Deloitte).

IDC on the archiving opportunity

“Archiving solutions remain critical to enterprises in highly regulated and litigious industries, and the value of archiving will grow as enterprises across all industries seek to generate more value from their data while keeping it secure and compliant. Cloud and SaaS solutions will remain the most important growth drivers in the archiving market. Our forecast indicates that public cloud services–based archiving software revenue will surpass on-premise archiving revenue in 2018. We expect public cloud/SaaS archiving solutions to account for 60% of total market revenue by 2021.” (IDC Worldwide Archiving Software Forecast, 2017–2021)

As a cloud provider, there is a massive market full of growth opportunities to take advantage of. Get in touch to chat about yours with James Clayton, Head of Partnerships at Solar Archive.