Companies' $180m email storage bill

Compliance worries look to have translated into some good news for storage companies -- businesses have been increasingly spending on archiving their electronic correspondence to make sure they're on the right side of the regulators, according to analysts.

A new report from analyst house IDC shows that worldwide revenues from email archiving software have increased sixfold from $33m in 2002 to reach $180m for 2004.

IDC is predicting that the compound annual growth rate will be around 50 percent for the market for the next three years.

As well as businesses throwing money at software companies to ensure they can find emails in order to answer regulatory and legal queries quickly, growth in the sheer volumes of data passing though companies has contributed to the increased software spend.