eDiscovery - three come along at once
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As expected, the information management company Iron Mountain has dropped out of the cloud-based data storage market with the sale of its service to eDiscovery specialist Autonomy. But Autonomy isn’t the only player currently beefing up its offering; Recommind has entered a strategic partnership with legal information behemoth LexisNexis and a third big player, Symantec, has just acquired another eDiscovery specialist, Clearwell.

It was as recently as April that Iron Mountain started hinting it wanted to get out of its public cloud data management service – during what turned out to be a pretty terrible month for the reputation of the Cloud generally (see LiveWire coverage). Now Autonomy has come to what it must presumably regard as a self-interested rescue, buying over six petabytes of managed data belonging to more than 6,000 former Iron Mountain customers.

Promising no disruption of service, Autonomy is quick to point out that its new customers will get much more than simple storage. Exploiting the meaning based capabilities of its IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) technology will mean they’ll also get regulatory compliance, legal discovery and analytics services.

It’s only a few months ago that Autonomy unveiled its cloud-based information management platform for the legal market (see LiveWire coverage) – but already it’s facing competition from LexisNexis. A strategic alliance with the predictive information management software specialist Recommind means that LN’s Hosted Litigation Solutions group will now provide access to Recommind’s Axcelerate On-Demand product – the claim being that this will enable enterprises and law firms to dramatically reduce the costs and time of document review and analysis in litigation and regulatory investigations.

It does seem to be a win-win for the two players; LN gains a useful additional web-based enhancement to fast, accurate document disclosure, and Recommind is able to deal with a much greater than expected rate of customer demand by joining with a long-established legal information provider. But already there’s more competition on the horizon – this time from online security specialist Symantec.

Like Autonomy, Symantec too has been on the acquisition trail, having signed an agreement to buy another eDiscovery specialist, Clearwell. With lawyers also squarely in its sights, Symantec says that Clearwell’s eDiscovery capabilities will complement those of its own Enterprise Vault, again reducing the cost and time of unearthing those pesky but vital documents.

As Symantec points out, there’s plenty of evidence that eDiscovery is a hot business to be in right now. But to witness three such similar moves within the period of a month is very striking nevertheless.

In each case, three big names – Autonomy, LexisNexis, Symantec – all with different backgrounds are linked to three lesser known ones. Expect further such alignments – whether by purchase or partnership – in the future.

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