SunGard Availability Services Enhances Managed E-Mail Archiving Solution to Address Business and Compliance Requirements

WAYNE, Pa., Oct. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGard Availability Services today launched an improved Managed E-Mail Archiving solution for highly reliable e-mail retention, availability and management designed to address specific regulatory, business and technical needs. The service provides a secure and reliable way to capture, transmit, archive, store and retrieve e-mails while helping meet compliance requirements. The Managed E-Mail Archiving solution also allows companies to optimize server performance and reduce e-mail message volume substantially.

Much of corporate communication today is driven by e-mail and e-mail folders are the place where organizations keep many of their records. The need to maintain complete audit trails and security may tax internal resources that need to provide a higher level of maintenance and support. SunGard's enterprise-class IT infrastructure helps manage e-mail archiving to help ensure that systems and networks are always on and e-mail applications and data are always available.

According to a May 30, 2007 Gartner report(1), the e-mail archiving industry is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 37.2% to reach $1 billion by 2011. "The key drivers for this growth will continue to be the need for better application management, replacing quotas and personal stores, and the need to save key business records for legal discovery and compliance requirements. This is a worldwide market with interest coming from all geographies. In the U.S., the December 2006 update to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires discovery information about the retention of electronic data, is moving many companies involved in a long evaluation and policy building cycle toward purchase and implementation more quickly."

In its Third Annual Litigation Trends Survey, presented in 2006, the law firm Fulbright and Jaworski LLP found that 80% of its respondents report that they are not prepared or only somewhat prepared for e-discovery. The survey also revealed that the average company with more than $1 billion in annual revenue is currently facing more than 500 discrete lawsuits where that company must produce e-mail messages. The cost to retrieve and review the messages can be as much as $2 per message and can total more than $30 million in annual legal expenditures. The industries most frequently targeted for these types of lawsuits are insurance, energy and construction followed by banking and financial services.

"For every organization, e-mail is fragile, complex and has hidden costs of business downtime that go beyond basic IT investments," said John Wilkens, product manager for messaging and collaboration at SunGard Availability Services. "SunGard's Managed E-Mail Archiving helps provide organizations with policy-based e-mail retention and e-discovery with full end-user access and outage protection at a fraction of the cost that would be needed for companies to deploy availability on their own. It also helps free up IT resources to manage core business competencies."

To enhance messaging and collaboration, SunGard also offers a suite of other e-mail services- E-Mail Availability Service, E-Mail Protection Service, Server Replication, and Vaulting.

    (1) Gartner, Inc., "E-Mail Active Archiving Market Update, 2007" by
        Carolyn DiCenzo, Kenneth Chin and Alan Dayley, May 30, 2007

About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions, helping to ensure that more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With nearly four million square feet of secure facilities, SunGard offers a complete range of information availability solutions that include managed IT, professional and business continuity services. SunGard provides services to support an always-on production environment, as well as over 30 technology platforms to support customers who require a traditional 24-48 hour recovery time frame. SunGard also has technology and systems management services for application and data center outsourcing, as well as business continuity consulting services and planning software. For more information about SunGard Availability Services, visit www.availability.sungard.com or call 1-800-523-4970.

About SunGard

With annual revenue exceeding $4 billion, SunGard is a global leader in software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also helps information-dependent enterprises of all types to ensure the continuity of their business. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including the world's 50 largest financial services companies. Visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

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