Gartner Inc.’s latest Magic Quadrant for enterprise information archiving shows that Mimecast Ltd. is way out in front of a market that looks to be increasingly dominated by specialists in the field.

It’s actually quite a competitive space too, with companies including Microsoft Corp., Proofpoint Inc., Global Relay Communications Inc., Veritas Technologies LLC and Smarsh Inc. all featuring in the “leaders” box, albeit some distance behind Mimecast.

Gartner defines enterprise information archiving as products and solutions for archiving user messaging content (such as email, IM, and public and business social media data) and other data types (such as data stored in enterprise file synchronization and sharing, Microsoft SharePoint documents, files, website content and some structured data). Email compliance and retention solutions encompass the vast majority of the market, the analyst firm added.

Aside from the leaders, there’s but a single “challenger” in the shape of Micro Focus International plc. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., ZL Technologies, Bloomberg and Actiance Inc. are holding their own as “visionaries”. Capax Discovery, CommVault, Barracuda Networks Inc., Dell EMC and Google Inc. round out the rest of the players, landing firmly inside the “niche players” segment.

With regards to Mimecast’s leadership in the market, Gartner said the company’s grid-based back-end scale and the capabilities of its own data centers “enable aggressive SLAs for email availability and also search/discovery of the archive data.” In addition, Mimecast benefits its customers with integrated modules for archiving, continuity and security for email, Gartner said.

Microsoft ranks second in the list due to its ability to provide “native capabilities for on-premises archiving of Exchange 2013 and 2016, and cloud-based archiving through Office 365 for Exchange Online, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Microsoft file shares.” In addition, third-party data, such as social media, IM and Bloomberg messaging data, can be ingested into the Microsoft repository through partners, Gartner said.

Also noteworthy is that Google ranks dead last in Gartner’s list of players in the enterprise information archiving space. It’s product, Google Vault, is fully integrated with Google applications and content, and demonstrates the useful ability to support high-volume environments. Even so, it comes with big limitations, such as only being applicable to Google-generated content and a very limited product roadmap that means it’s unlikely to improve its ranking any time soon.

You can check out the full list of each player’s strengths and weaknesses in Gartner’s report here.