With its FrontBridge offering, Microsoft is a strong performer in the message archiving hosted services market. Microsoft is an enterprise collaboration platform vendor (as well as a budding enterprise content management vendor) and is working on deepening integration among its message archiving solution and its other offerings. Microsoft has 273 FrontBridge customers, almost all of them acquired in the past year. Microsoft FrontBridge is well suited to financial services firms that need to comply with regulations for archiving and supervision and want to outsource message archiving to a leading hosted service provider. It is especially well suited to firms that are standardizing on Microsoft’s collaboration platform, have distributed users in English-speaking parts of the world, and need basic search/eDiscovery capabilities.
