Email has become an essential factor for nearly every business in existence today, serving a wide variety of roles ranging from internal communications and business intelligence enabling, to end market engagement and the growth of a given brand’s presence. In fact, a recent report published earlier this year by digital technology-focused analysts eMarketer.com indicates that email use in the U.S. has not only increased some 6.3 percent since 2013 to around 233 million users (72.4 percent market penetration), but that by 2019 overall penetration will hit upwards of 90 percent of all internet users. This is a massive target for businesses and is a major reason why email marketing is still king, despite the growth of social media marketing as a component of an overall marketing effort.
Private internet media heavy-hitter BuzzFeed, for instance, relies heavily on driving traffic back to their site via emails containing original content, and email is routinely one of its top five or six traffic drivers each month, ranking right alongside Twitter and Pinterest. Coming from an entity like BuzzFeed that gets 200-plus million unique visitors each month, news that email traffic grew by around 20 percent in 2013 and 2014 month-over-month should serve as an important lesson to investors and businesses alike about the importance of email to the bottom line.
The eMarketer report mentioned earlier also indicated that around 35.6 percent of internet users actively subscribe to emails from brands in order to stay up to date on the latest news and information, as well as gain access to timely offers or discounts on a given product. However, because email isn’t a standalone storage solution, one of the hottest growth areas today is email archiving solutions, the market for which is expected to maintain a CAGR of nearly 14 percent from 2015 to 2019, according to market research publishing giant Technavio.
Archiving emails and other unstructured data for everything from compliance and risk mitigation, to governance and cost optimization, has become a major focus for SME and enterprise companies, as well as educational institutions and government agencies. In fact, a study from renowned market research, analysis and advisory firm IDC (International Data Corporation) out earlier this year in June, which looked at both the top SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies and ISVs (independent software vendors), indicated that the global archiving software market hit $1.5 billion last year. The strongest growth for the industry is coming from cloud archiving, which is set to deliver a 9.3 percent CAGR through 2019.
Little wonder then that iGambit (OTCQB: IGMB), an extremely lithe, diversified holding company and enterprise incubator focused on early-stage tech companies with viral potential, recently acquired Network Products Guide Product Innovation Award recipient, ArcMail Technology. iGambit subsequently announced the selling off of certain assets of its wholly-owned Gotham Innovation Lab subsidiary, in order to plough the proceeds from the sale directly into the accelerated development of ArcMail’s promising email archiving and management solutions. Solutions aimed not only at providing comprehensive and readily accessible storage, but boosting network performance and satisfying increasingly stringent regulatory requirements as well.
This strategic move by iGambit is perfectly aligned with the company’s core values, which emphasize the targeting and development of such companies as ArcMail that have runaway potential, but which require IGMB’s strategic guidance and operational support in order to take things to the next level. Even in an industry dominated by major players like Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), whose Amazon Web Services was once again top-ranked by marketing, research and advisory firm Gartner this year in cloud IaaS (infrastructure as a service), as well as cloud-connected appliance players like Barracuda (NYSE: CUDA), there is ample room for an investor-accessible company like IGMB, whose now wholly-owned ArcMail subsidiary is geared more towards the SME market.
By providing a diverse array of simplified, affordable solutions that are ideal for smaller companies, which still possess the kind of robust security and broad-spectrum archival capabilities on offer from sector majors, ArcMail is able to hit the sweet spot time and again with stunning agility, directly competing with juggernauts like Amazon, which services companies ranging from Nike (NYSE: NKE) to Siemens (OTC: SIEGY). A good example of this is how ArcMail was chosen by wholly-owned Power Solutions International (NASDAQ: PSIX) subsidiary Power Great Lakes to fulfill its email archiving needs with a secure, readily accessible solution that ensures content is neither altered or deleted.
After extensive due diligence by Power Great Lakes’ IT Manager, involving the vetting of numerous software and appliance based solutions, ArcMail’s flagship Defender™ appliance was chosen to avoid clunky alternatives like storing old mail on Exchange, which is a considerable network performance hit, putting a strain on the server(s) and requiring unwieldy backup times. ArcMail’s Defender line of email archiving hardware has been deployed everywhere from K-12 school districts and universities, to government agencies like the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, and finance concerns such as Franklin Financial Network’s (NYSE: FSB) wholly-owned banking subsidiary, Franklin Synergy Bank.
With a slew of offerings on the table ranging from ArcMail’s fully hosted and managed archiving solution, to cloud-driven archiving through ArcMail’s cloud storage gateway, and virtual machine-driven archiving through a VMware environments-based implementation equivalent to the company’s Defender line, ArcMail has a suite of choices able to satisfy any client’s needs. Moreover, the company has a range of market-driven archiving products like ArcMail Guardian™ that can automatically encode, index and archive inbound, outbound and internal mail, and is designed to be the perfect one-stop-shop appliance solution for Google Apps™ and Office 365 Mail. There is also ArcMail’s solutions for SharePoint™ Files, Salesforce Chatter™ conversations, and social media interactions.
This is a shrewd move for a veteran incubator like iGambit, which has a considerable track record of success with hands-on development of startups into multi-million dollar businesses, all accomplished using its own capital. With a deep bench of veteran executives led by IGMB’s President, Chairman and CEO, John Salerno, who has spent over four decades on the frontlines in public and private computer software and service companies, iGambit has the talent and the vision needed to continue executing on its acquisition and development goals.
The focus for IGMB moving forward will continue to be on acquisition targets that have high-margin, predictable earnings potential, where iGambit can step in and assist with crystallizing the licensing and servicing capabilities that form the foundation of a given recurring revenue model. Long-term stockholder value accretion is the overarching objective for IGMB, which facilitates partner company network growth until such time as the matured entity can be profitability spun-off.
To get a closer look at iGambit’s strategy, visit http://www.igambit.com
