Mimecast, a supplier of cloud-based email archiving, continuity and security for Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange and Office 365, has been placed in the Champion segment of a new Bloor Research InComparison Paper.

Bloor Research is one of Europe's leading independent IT research, analysis and consultancy organisations.

The paper, which features a Bullseye chart that ranks vendors as Champions, Innovators or Challengers, examines the e-mail archiving market, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of key players in the space.

Entitled “Email Archiving Best Practices: a Competitive Overview of Major Players in the Market,” the paper evaluated technology and service providers on their archiving services across criteria such as user experience, security, data center coverage and management interface.

Officials with Bloor Research said that in the report, Mimecast scored highly for-Its strong unified e-mail management offering and its strong SLA that guarantees 100 percent virus protection, 100 percent availability, 98 percent spam protection and 0.0001 percent spam false positives, including via BlackBerry (News - Alert) mobile devices, among other such things.

"Increasingly, businesses are realizing that e-mail archiving should not be looked at as a standalone application. Rather, it should be considered to be part of a broader e-mail management solution that includes mailbox management, policy enforcement, security, continuity and e-discovery,” said Fran Howarth, senior analyst at Bloor Research, in a statement.

Howarth said that vendors, such as Mimecast, that have integrated all of these capabilities into one unified system have a distinct advantage, as they can provide a single, centralized management point that provides visibility over the entire service and that provides management reports and an audit trail for governance and compliance purposes.

He pointed out that it is its strong combination of functionality, unique features and a track record of innovation that earns Mimecast its place squarely in the centre of the Champion sector.

"At Mimecast, we have never really viewed e-mail archiving as a standalone application, as separate from continuity or security. While they can be purchased separately, the true value of our Unified Email Management service is that we have designed a system that integrates these functions into a single platform, administered through a single admin console,” said Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast.

Bauer said that what the Bloor report highlights is that e-mail archiving in a tightly integrated system provides tangible advantages both to the system administrator and to the end user.

Other vendors included in the Bloor Research InComparison Paper included Symantec, Autonomy, Sonian, Google (News - Alert), Microsoft and LiveOffice. See Appendix A for the Bullseye Chart or click here to download a full copy of the paper.