Growing Compliance Concerns, Expanded Service Offerings Fuel Smarsh Growth in 2009

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, announced today that it finished 2009 with a 33^rd consecutive quarter of increasing revenue. Amid a changing compliance landscape, Smarsh has emerged as a preferred email archiving solution provider for organizations across industries and sizes. In 2009, the addition of new clients through competitive conversions and companies switching to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment model, as well as strong customer retention and expansion of services among existing clients, all contributed to the company’s growth.

“More and more organizations are adopting hosted email archiving solutions, recognizing their performance, cost and infrastructure benefits, and a high satisfaction level among current users”

“More and more organizations are adopting hosted email archiving solutions, recognizing their performance, cost and infrastructure benefits, and a high satisfaction level among current users,” said Stephen Marsh, CEO and founder of Smarsh. “Firms have grown more discriminating as services mature and the regulatory environment evolves. We fill the compliance gap for firms looking for a reliable, manageable and interoperable solution and the support and innovation that provide unwavering peace of mind.”

Customer Satisfaction Underpins Growth

Smarsh’s customer base reached more than 9,000 organizations in 2009, and the company now archives more than 100 million emails per month. In a recent survey conducted by Osterman Research, Smarsh was cited among organizations using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) email archiving solutions as the leading vendor for:

Overall Satisfaction with Service/Vendor
Overall Value of the Service/Vendor
Overall Customer Service
Vendor Expertise and Industry Knowledge
Vendor Uptime
Confidence in Vendor Ability to Meet Emerging Needs

The full study, which was commissioned by Smarsh, is available at www.smarsh.com/survey.

“Smarsh has helped us to streamline our email archiving and review process, making audits virtually painless,” said Senior Vice President Sherry Abbott of Polar Investment Counsel Inc., a Minnesota-based securities and commodities brokerage firm that has worked with Smarsh since 2006. “They know our business inside and out, and we can trust them to deliver a secure and reliable archiving service.”

Industry Groups Recognize Smarsh Leadership

The company’s leadership in the archiving field was also noted in market research from independent analysts. An April 2009 research report from Gartner, Inc. listed Smarsh’s market share as the second-largest among outsourced email archiving providers.¹ In October 2009, IDC cited Smarsh for the largest revenue growth among worldwide email archiving vendors, with a growth rate more than double that of the second fastest growing vendor.²

In recognition of its rapid growth, Smarsh was ranked No. 61 on Deloitte LLP’s Technology Fast 500™, and was named for the second consecutive year to the Inc. 500 annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. The Portland Business Journal named Smarsh the fastest-growing private company in Oregon for 2009. Smarsh was also a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Entrepreneurs Network Working Capital Stage Company of the Year. Ernst & Young named CEO Stephen Marsh a finalist for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Pacific Northwest and the Portland Business Journal recognized him as one of Oregon’s “40-under-40” young business leaders.

Commitment to Perpetual Innovation

Smarsh introduced a series of new products and enhancements in 2009, driven by client input and changing recordkeeping compliance requirements.

smarshEncrypt. The Smarsh secure messaging and file transfer solution enables users to securely transmit email and files in accordance with emerging state and Federal data protection and data breach mandates.
Social Media Archiving. In light of growing use and regulation of social media, Smarsh introduced social media archiving solutions to help clients enforce and evaluate company social media policy.
Integration. Smarsh’s unique hosted architecture supports integration with both on-premise and SaaS email hosting platforms, including Google Apps Premier Edition and Microsoft Exchange 2010. Additionally, clients can produce data from their messaging archive on-demand in virtually any form requested, facilitating interoperability with third-party e-Discovery applications.

“We are grateful to our customers, employees and business partners for their contributions to our success in 2009,” said Marsh. “With their support, and our core commitments to unrivaled customer service and to perpetual technological innovation, we expect Smarsh to reach new heights in 2010.”

¹ Gartner, Inc. “Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving: 2Q09 Update” by Adam Couture. 27 April 2009.

² IDC. “Worldwide Email Archiving Applications 2009-2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendor Shares: Changes in Buying Behavior But Market Still Strong” by Laura DuBois and Vivian Tero. October 2009.

About Smarsh (www.smarsh.com)

Founded in 2001, Smarsh® is the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email-archiving solutions for message compliance and records retention, proactive litigation readiness and mail server data management. Smarsh solutions for data-leak prevention and secure messaging help users meet email and file transfer encryption obligations, mitigate risk associated with outbound email and facilitate email supervision.

The SaaS (software-as-a-service) delivery model enables clients to eliminate IT infrastructure costs and minimize operating burden, while benefiting from the company’s expertise and experience in hosting large volumes of mission-critical client data. Customizable solutions fit the needs, budgets and technological infrastructure of any organization and are matched with unrivaled customer support and service.