Part 2 in the Hosted Archiving Series
Part 1:
Dell saves their investment in MessageOne at the best possible moment
Part 3: Fortiva focuses on security and search to drive retrieval of hosted enterprise archive data
Fortiva would have been a better option for Dell (NYSE:DELL), had Fortiva been local to the Austin area. According to Praising Gaw, VP of Marketing at Fortiva, they maintain a good business relationship with Microsoft as the sole provider for Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure Online Services for Enterprises. Since Dell also values a good relationship with Microsoft, why didn’t Dell Computer Corporation nurture the Fortiva relationship? One obvious answer is there weren’t any vested interests in Fortiva, by Dell Computer Corporation or the Dell family.
In defense of the acquisition, I’m sure having Adam Dell on the MessageOne board gave the decision makers special insight into the company. Technically speaking, Fortiva has multiple technical advancements over competitors and an exclusive partnership with Microsoft.
Since Fortiva is Microsoft’s go to partner for hosted archiving services in the Business Productivity Infrastructure Online Services, I expected them to get into more details about their relationship. Fortiva didn’t share many details about their relationship with Microsoft. They simply said it was successful and they work well with Microsoft. To my surprise, Microsoft already has a solution for hosted archiving, but has chosen Fortiva for their Enterprise accounts. It is clear that Microsoft considers Fortiva the best solution for their top tier accounts. Thusly, even if your company only has a few thousand or less employees, it would be prudent to put Fortiva on the short list of products to evaluate as a hosted archiving service.
Technically speaking, the partnership with Microsoft is for a soup-to-nuts hosted Enterprise Exchange environment. Microsoft will deploy, host, manage and support your Microsoft Exchange environment in their data centers while Fortiva is used as the archiving and email management system. However, whenever any company is hosting corporate data IT departments should have one thing on their mind; security. Securing your corporate data in a data center controlled by Microsoft should be paramount. Any company hosting your data, whether competitive or not, should provide some level of data encryption for data in-motion and at-rest.
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Dell saves their investment in MessageOne at the best possible moment
Next: Fortiva focuses on security and search to drive retrieval of hosted enterprise archive data