Email has become the cornerstone of daily business communications, changing the way in which organizations interact  with employees, partners, customers  and suppliers.  In fact, email use is now so ingrained into our way  of  communication, that some wonder how we ever conducted business without it.  The growth of email use is consistently on the rise with an estimated 403M corporate  email accounts in 2002, nearly doubling to 744M by 2006 1.  Meanwhile, traditional forms of messaging such as voicemail and fax are not expected to vanish.   In fact, these message types, along with instant messaging and email, are expected to merge into one centralized messaging system, referred to as unified communications.   In addition, all  forms of  corporate messaging need to be
accessible through wireless technologies, as employees become more mobile.  Email has also become a corporate  governance issue  for many  organizations; companies must be able to efficiently and cost-effectively store, archive, and retrieve email messages.

As the use of messaging and collaboration technologies  grow in popularity, companies are  faced  with  a  multitude  of  communications  options  from  voicemail  to  email,  to wireless, instant messaging and much more. Unfortunately, most of these communication options are not always integrated with each other, which often leads to communication overload and frustration.  Portals and Web services are just some of the elements that comprise a full enterprise communications strategy, however, in order to be fully effective, they need to be integrated with email, voicemail, wireless and a broad range of
other services. As the volume of emails and voicemails increases, companies need better solutions to help with storing, organizing and retrieving their information.  
 
Along with the growth in information sharing, enterprises are also looking for better ways to organize their internal information, reduce administration time and costs, and streamline the amount of hardware needed for information storage.  One of the key issues facing many enterprises today is the excessive complexity of managing large numbers of distributed email servers (and file servers), and the associated cost this entails in terms of operational complexity and overall administrative overhead.
 
As the need for messaging  and collaboration grows, companies are searching  for new solutions and approaches which  can scale to unprecedented capacity  levels while ensuring  reliability,  consistent  levels  of  service,  top  of  the  line  security,  and  reduced administration costs.