06/24/2008

Proofpoint, Inc. announced that it has acquired Fortiva, Inc., a provider of on-demand email archiving solutions for legal discovery, regulatory compliance and email storage management.

ebizQ received the following:

Fortiva provides an on-demand email archiving solution that addresses three key challenges -- email storage management, legal discovery and regulatory compliance -- without the headaches of managing an archive in-house. As a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, the Fortiva Archiving Suite(TM) can be up and running in days, with minimal upfront capital costs and planning requirements. The Fortiva solution uses an innovative hybrid deployment model that delivers the cost advantages of SaaS with the guaranteed security of on premises appliance.

Fortiva's archiving solution becomes the latest addition to Proofpoint's growing family of SaaS and hybrid solutions. Proofpoint's flagship SaaS solution, Proofpoint on Demand(TM), delivers Proofpoint's industry-leading messaging security features-including anti-spam, anti-virus, email policy enforcement, data loss prevention and policy-based encryption capabilities -- as a cost-effective, easy-to-adopt and easy-to-manage on-demand service.

"Our customers look to Proofpoint to help them manage, protect and enable their corporate email. Secure, easy-to-use email archiving is one of the most frequently-requested features from our global customer base," said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, Inc. "Fortiva's email archiving solution is the most advanced, secure, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution in the market today and we're excited to have Fortiva's team and technology as part of Proofpoint. Fortiva's on-demand solution is a natural extension to Proofpoint's email security platform, so nearly all of our customers can deploy and benefit from Fortiva immediately."

All Fortiva products and services continue to be available with no disruptions in service for current Fortiva customers and channel partners. Development and support for the Fortiva Archiving Suite will continue to be based out of Fortiva's Canadian headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. The solution is primarily sold through channel partners, including Microsoft Online Services and MessageLabs.

"Joining forces with a leading enterprise email vendor like Proofpoint is a win-win situation for Fortiva and our customers," said Chris Tebo, CTO of Fortiva. "Our shared focus on customer satisfaction, leading-edge technology and innovative deployment models makes this a perfect fit. Becoming part of the Proofpoint team greatly extends Fortiva's global reach and visibility in the market."

Industry analysts have acknowledged email archiving as a "must have" component of today's enterprise email infrastructures, noting that enterprise needs for record retention, electronic discovery and improving mailbox management have resulted in rapid growth for the email archiving market.

"Our research shows that the vast majority of enterprise IT organizations have been required to search through backups to retrieve one or more email messages in the past 3 years. Companies of all sizes should be archiving email, so they are prepared to meet the legal discovery, supervisory and retention requirements that impact them," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "On demand email archiving services are ideal for organizations that want to quickly deploy a solution without large upfront investments of capital or internal IT resources."

As just one example of the forces driving rapid growth in the email archiving market, email is an increasingly common target in legal discovery. Recent research by Proofpoint (http://www.proofpoint.com/outbound) revealed that nearly a quarter of large U.S. enterprises were ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the past 12 months. Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) mandate that these electronic communications need to be produced in a timely manner and place a burden on businesses to retain all of their electronically-stored information (ESI) -- including email-for litigation and regulatory purposes.

While data loss prevention features -- such as the content monitoring, filtering and encryption features provided by Proofpoint's appliance, virtual appliance and on-demand services -- can help enforce email policies and mitigate many of the legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email, the high-performance, on-demand archiving solution provided by Fortiva delivers additional benefits, including:

-- Instant legal discovery: Companies can retrieve all relevant messages in seconds from a secure archive.
-- Worry-free email retention: Retention policies are easy to configure and automatically enforced.
-- Simplified email storage management: End users benefit from a virtually unlimited email inbox with instant access to archived messages -- right within Microsoft Outlook. At the same time, Exchange performance is greatly enhanced by reducing the size of Exchange's message store.
-- Guaranteed data security: Unique DoubleBlind Encryption(TM) guarantees the security of each customer's data, ensuring that no one outside the organization can access archived data. Messages are encrypted before being sent outside the customer firewall over a secure connection and are stored in encrypted form in the archive.