This document describes key issues in the archiving industry, including some of the reasons for archiving messages and some of the drivers in the industry.

Osterman Research is a market research and consulting firm that is focused heavily on studying the role of electronic communications in the workplace. This includes e-mail, instant messaging (IM), voice over IP (VoIP), collaboration, and Web 2.0, as well as all of the related technologies and drivers, including security, archiving, and encryption. Osterman Research conducts a lot of primary research, mostly among IT professionals and end users. This research is conducted in order to learn about the problems they are experiencing, what motivates the decisions they make, the prices they want to pay for products, their plans for the near future, and so on.