Forrester Report Shows ZANTAZ Overtaking Symantec Because Of E-Discovery Functionality
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Working my way through a backlog of articles and reports this week, I came across Forrester’s Archiving Wave Report for Q1 2008, which was published last month. I spoke to Barry Murphy, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, around the time of its publication and it’s clear he views e-discovery as a major driver of archiving sales. It was, therefore, no surprise that Forrester’s evaluation criteria heavily weighted e-discovery. To quote the report: “We focused on value-add functionality like records and retention management and eDiscovery support…vendors need to offer real solutions for eDiscovery” (p.4).
The report’s most striking conclusion is that ZANTAZ is rated ahead of Symantec. Every previous report from Gartner and Forrester has identified Symantec as the market leader, so this is potentially a significant shift. Forrester’s primary criticism of Symantec is that it has “product gaps”, more specifically “a reliance on the end-of-lifed Alta Vista search engine (a major issue, given the importance of search to eDiscovery).” (p.9) By contrast, Forrester writes that ZANTAZ offers: “an EAS product with strong search, analytics,…and advanced eDiscovery capabilities – the value-add features customers are demanding.” (p.8)
It’s worth taking a moment to understand Forrester’s criticism of Symantec in more detail. Companies buy archives for 2 reasons: mailbox management and e-discovery. For mailbox management, search is becoming less important since most users will rely on Windows search in Vista or Google desktop. Rather than provide their own search functionality, archives will instead just integrate with Microsoft and/or Google.
But the reverse is true for e-discovery, where search has become increasingly important. The growing volume of litigation, regulatory inquiries, and corporate investigations requires companies to continually comb through their archives in a highly iterative process that often involves IT and legal. Forrester’s analysis shows that – for this purpose – Symantec’s functionality is insufficient.
There’s no doubt Enterprise Vault is a great product. It has long been a market leader, and generates a huge amount of revenue for Symantec. But archiving is an intensely competitive market. So, if Symantec does not improve its search/indexing capabilities for e-discovery, it leaves itself vulnerable to others who will. To me, that’s the most important point that Forrester is making in its report.
