Bank aims to cut down email costs

Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson (DKB) aims to save £1 million per year through improved handling of its email burden.

DKB rolled out Microsoft Exchange as its email system for 8,000 users worldwide in 1997. It has since accumulated almost one terabyte of archived messages.

To reduce the growing costs of server storage and free up its support staff, DKB has turned to email archiving software supplier KVS, which was formed as a spin-off from Compaq in 1999.

"We'd gone beyond the limits of Microsoft Exchange," said Mike Persaud, messaging consultant at DKB. "We were experiencing very long backup times and deploying more and more servers. When users wanted to restore mailboxes, it could take about eight hours."

"We also have finance industry regulations which say we have to keep all our emails for seven years," he added, "so the problem would only have worsened."

"I wish that users would do better housekeeping. Many emails are just of the form: 'Shall we meet at the pub after work?', but each generates several responses," he said.

"Now we can automatically archive emails and circumvent users having to manage their mailbox by searching on content to determine whether it needs to be saved."

Researcher IDC has found that corporate users generate four billion emails every day, a figure expected to increase to seven billion by 2003. According to research commissioned by KVS, inefficient management and retrieval of old emails can waste £120 per user every year.