EMC Monday rolled out software for archiving e-mail messages and reporting data from enterprise applications.

The two offerings are EMC Documentum Archive Services for E-mail, which collects and archives incoming and outgoing e-mail messages, and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports, which captures reports from ERP systems, invoices, Web services and other content.

EMC already offered an e-mail archiving tool, called E-mailXtender, but the company says that product is geared for users who want to archive only e-mail, while the new tool is designed for those who need to archive e-mail plus other content types.

The new software is based on enterprise content management technology EMC gained through its US$1.7 billion acquisition of Documentum and is part of the storage giant’s strategy to provide a unified approach for collecting, storing and accessing data, regardless of content type.

EMC last year released the first leg of this approach with the launch of its archiving software for SAP software, and in the future the company plans to extend archiving to myriad other forms of content including images, videos and Web content.

The company says that by adopting a unified archiving approach, businesses can expedite data recovery for compliance and litigation, reduce the amount of redundant data that can occur when storing content in separate silos, ease management by setting and enforcing policies across multiple types of data in one central place, and be able to better mine data for innovation.

EMC says many of the capabilities of the Documentum content management platform, such as version management control and search of unstructured data, were a good fit for archiving software.

The software will support other storage vendors’ products, said EMC.

"I think their biggest challenge will be trying to convince enterprises that there’s a one-stop shop for archiving all their data," said Brian Babineau, with the Enterprise Strategy Group in Palo Alto, Calif.

EMC will have to overcome organizational and political barriers around archiving data, as different groups within companies often have different methods for archiving data and may have concerns about storing data in a central place with other groups, said Babineau.

-Shelley Solheim, IDG News Service

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