Analyst and consulting firm Ovum has placed CRM vendor Autonomy (News - Alert) as "the leader in the enterprise information access market," for "market position and breadth of functional scope and appropriateness for the enterprise" in a recent report.

 

The report, titled "The Future of Search," notes that "through the acquisitions in 2007 of the archiving specialist Zantaz, and most recently UK records management specialist Meridio," Autonomy has earned the recognition.

 

"Information access will become increasingly automated with applications initiating the find/ search/ discover/ retrieval process, and users being unaware of the activity that has been performed," said Mike Davis, Ovum's (News - Alert) senior analyst and author of the report. "The majority of the employees do not either have the time or often the skills or training to

search efficiently and effectively."

 

Davis called enterprise information access "a major opportunity for improving productivity, reducing error and corporate risk."

 

The report says Autonomy has "potentially the highest market awareness for search," and that its two 2007 acquisitions give it "significant capabilities in the compliance and eDiscovery field."

 

Last month Zantaz, a vendor of archiving, eDiscovery and Proactive Information Risk Management product, claimed that its Digital Safe on-demand compliance and eDiscovery archival product has "the largest amount of data under management."

 

Using Autonomy's IDOL search engine, Zantaz claims the unique position of being "the only service provider to create a consolidated archive of all information sources, including e-mail and IM, voice video, and enterprise systems."

 

Hosted services for e-mail archiving provide massive storage capacity and scalability, along with the management and maintenance, for huge volumes of information and records that organizations are required to archive by regulations including SEC (News - Alert) Rule 17a-4. Autonomy Zantaz Digital Safe is marketed as helping organizations meet the supervision, records retention and retrieval requirements of these industry and government regulations.

 

"With the increase in volume and variety of message formats in today's enterprises, including instant messages and voice-mails, it has become mission-critical for organizations to select an effective enterprise archiving product that can help them to better understand the corporate value and legal significance hidden within their information," said Anthony Bettencourt (News - Alert), CEO of Autonomy Zantaz.