I send an archiving company all my backup data and one day...

* An admin deletes their entire filesystem?

* Their Hard Disks fail?

* They go titsup?

* They change their service agreement and hold my data to ransom?

* A rogue employee starts selling my confidential information?

I think i'll stick to my trusty tape backup thanks!

what they're doing has been done for a number of years now by products such as Symantec Enterprise Vault, EMC DiskXtender and others so this is nothing new to the party El Reg.

when you look at the wider landscape, a number of companies have expanded way past this into MOSS, IM, as well as open storage SDK's/API's so this is a lot of "Me Too" and a little of any interesting new content. still i guess it is good for them to be catching up with long-standing industry trends.

Julian's points are just why we bought the Enterprise Vault product instead of the "me too" vendors. The main point that discriminating buyers purchase is indeed a platform -- flexible, integrated (and integrating) to sources that really matter. After all, archiving has a far wider footprint, and as a Tier-1 application, is not something that a "me too" approach will handle over time. We can archive our SAP and other vendors' DB's just fine thank you very much.

Now I'm sure you could call me slightly biased, but with so many years of success, I'm not going to lose my job with a platform of technology from one of the worlds' largest companies.