Arcserve introduces email archiving

Arcserve (www.arcserve.com), the leader in mid-market data protection, just introduced a new service to UDP with an email archiving extension. Based on the recent acquisition of Fastarchiver, Arcserve is now able to naturally extend its installed base with a very frequent request from users to reduce complexity and channel partners to up/cross sell.
This move is a technology acquisition for Arcserve between 2 US companies and as noted by our colleague Chris Mellor on The Register, a company named Fastarchiver Software, LLC (file number 5967696) was founded 14 months ago in Delaware.
The product is branded as Arcserve UDP Archiving and will be sell to distributed enterprise, ROBO and mid-market companies.
In term of use cases, Arcserve targets 3 usages: compliance, legal risk and primary storage optimization with search/indexing, logical worm/legal hold/immutable and free space management with no stubbing technique capabilities.
Something seems to be missing in the product as the protection of archive image is made by a backup with classic UDP. It's pretty good for integration and will transparent for users but I really think that Fastarchiver had some ideas to sell the product standalone and should have thought to make image redundant by itself with 3 way replication or even with some erasure coding techniques.
Of course emails are deduped with a single instance storage engine and stored encrypted in an unalterable format, captured when they're sent and before they touch the destination mailbox. UDP Archiving works with on-prem and cloud-based email engines such Microsoft Exchange, IBM Domino, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Gmail. The cloud service providers supported are Azure and AWS but not yet Google.
In phase 1, the product will be shipped as software and in phase 2, soon, in a appliance form factor to be fully aligned with the current Arcserve offering.

We expect Arcserve to extend this module with the support of file systems on both Windows and Linux, its core operating environment.
Competition is tough with a crowded market with Smarsh, Mimecast, Proofpoint, Global Relay, Netmail, Sonian, Erado, Veritas or Barracuda but Arcserve has serious advantages with portfolio effect and a huge partner ecosystem.
Arcserve recognizes that backup is good but not enough probably to sustain a business growth with the growing pressure of the cloud service providers especially in the mid-market segment or other "classic" players that have extended their line with a cloud presence. It's a key move for Arcserve and a good natural growth with a very similar market that fits perfectly with backup. It's also a strategic direction for the company to be considered as a key target for potential acquirer due to this extended product and solutions coverage. Good catch and good move.