Entries Tagged 'eDiscovery' ↓
January 27th, 2012 — Archiving, Collaboration, Content management, Data management, eDiscovery, Search, Text analysis
Every New Year affords us the opportunity to dust down our collective crystal balls and predict what we think will be the key trends and technologies dominating our respective coverage areas over the coming 12 months.We at 451 Research just published our 2012 Preview report; at almost 100 pages it’s a monster, but offers some great insights across twelve technology subsectors, spanning from managed hosting and the future of cloud to the emergence of software-defined networking and solid state storage; and everything in between. The report is available to both 451Research clients and non-clients (in return for a few details); access the landing page
here. There’s a press release of highlights
here. Also, mark your diaries for a webinar discussing report highlights on Thursday Feb 9 at noon ET, which will be open for clients and non-clients to attend. Registration details to follow soon…
Here are a selection of key takeaways from the first part of the Information Management preview, which focuses on information governance, ediscovery, search, collaboration and file sharing. (Matt Aslett will be posting highlights of part 2, which focuses more on data management and analytics, shortly.)
- One of the most obvious common themes that will continue to influence technology spending decisions in the coming year is the impact of continued explosive data and information growth. This continues to shape new legal frameworks and technology stacks around information governance and e-discovery, as well as to drive a new breed of applications growing up around what we term the ‘Total Data’ landscape.
- Data volumes and distributed data drive the need for more automation and auto-classification capabilities will continue to emerge more successfully in e-discovery, information governance and data protection veins — indeed, we expect to see more intersection between these, as we noted in a recent post.
- The maturing of the cloud model – especially as it relates to file sharing and collaboration, but also from a more structured database perspective – will drive new opportunities and challenges for IT professionals in the coming year. Looks like 2012 may be the year of ‘Dropbox for the enterprise.’
- One of the big emerging issues that rose to the fore in 2011, and is bound to get more attention as the New Year proceeds, is around the dearth of IT and business skills in some of these areas, without which the industry at large will struggle to harness and truly exploit the attendant opportunities.
- The changes in information management in recent years have encouraged (or forced) collaboration between IT departments, as well as between IT and other functions. Although this highlights that many of the issues here are as much about people and processes as they are about technology, the organizations able to leap ahead in 2012 will be those that can most effectively manage the interaction of all three.
- We also see more movement of underlying information management infrastructures into the applications arena. This is true with search-based applications, as well as in the Web-experience management vein, which moves beyond pure Web content management. And while Microsoft SharePoint continues to gain adoption as a base layer of content-management infrastructure, there is also growth in the ISV community that can extend SharePoint into different areas at the application-level.
There is a lot more in the report about proposed changes in the e-discovery arena, advances of the cloud, enterprise search and impact of mobile devices and bring-your-device-to-work on information management.
January 20th, 2012 — Archiving, eDiscovery, M&A
We commented recently on Symantec’s acquisition of cloud archiving specialist LiveOffice. The announcement also afforded Big Yellow an opportunity to unveil what it calls “Intelligent Information Governance;” an over-arching theme that provides the context for some of the product-level integrations it has been working on. For example, it just announced improved integration between its Clearwell eDiscovery suite and its on-premise archive software, EnterpriseVault (stay tuned for more on this following LegalTech later this month).
There’s clearly an opportunity to go deeper than product-level ‘integration,’ however. In a blog post, Symantec VP Brian Dye raised an issue that we have been seeing for a while, especially among some of our larger end-user clients. In the post, Brian discusses the fundamental contention that all of us – from individuals to corporations to governments — face around information governance — striking the right balance between control of information and freedom of information.
Software has emerged to help us manage this contention, most typically through data loss prevention (DLP) tools – to control what data does and doesn’t leave the organization — and eDiscovery and records management tools, to control what data is retained, and for how long. Brian noted that there is an opportunity to do much more here by linking the two sides of what is in many ways the same coin, for example by sharing the classification schemes used to define and manage critical and confidential information.
This is an idea that we have discussed at length internally, with some of our larger end-user clients, and with a good few security and IM vendors. Notably, many vendors responded by telling us that, though a good idea in principle, in reality organizations are too siloed to get value from such capabilities; DLP is owned and operated by the security team, while eDiscovery is managed by legal, records management and technology teams. While some of the end-users we have discussed this with are certainly siloed to a point, they are also working to address this issue by developing a more collaborative approach, establishing cross-functional teams, and so on.
A cynic would point out that some self interest might be at play here too from a vendor perspective; why sell one integrated product to a company when you can sell them essentially the same technology twice. But of course, we’re not the remotest bit cynical (!) There is also the reality that at most large vendors, product portfolios have been put together at least in part by acquisitions. Security and e-discovery products may be sold separately because they are, in fact, separate products with little to no integration in terms of products or sales organizations. And vendors may not yet be motivated to do the hard integration work (technically, organizationally), if they are not seeing consistent enough demand from consolidated buying teams at large organizations.
Wendy Nather, Research Director of our security practice, notes that such integration is desirable;
– Users don’t WANT to have meta-thoughts about their data; they just want to get their work done, which is why it’s hard to implement a user-driven classification process for DLP or for governance. The alternative is a top-down implementation, and that would work even better with only one ‘top’ — that is, the security and legal teams working from the same integrated page.
However, Wendy also notes that such an approach is itself not without complexity;
– Confidential data can be highly contextual in nature (for example, when data samples get small enough to identify individuals, triggering HIPAA or FERPA); you need advanced analytics on top of your DLP to trigger a re-classification when this happens. Why, you might even call this Data Event Management (DEM).
It’s notable that Symantec is now starting to talk up the notion of a unified, or converged approach to data classification. Of course, it is one of the better-positioned vendors to take advantage here, given its acquisitions in both DLP (Vontu in 2007) and eDiscovery (Clearwell in 2011), while LiveOffice adds some intriguing options for doing some of this in the cloud (especially if merged with its hosted security offerings from MessageLabs).
Nonetheless, we look forward to hearing more from Symantec — and others — about progress here through 2012. Indeed, if you are attending LegalTech in New York in a couple of weeks, then our eDiscovery analyst David Horrigan would love to hear your thoughts. Additionally, senior security analyst Steve Coplan will be taking a longer look at the convergence of data management and security in his upcoming report on “The Identities of Data.”
In other words, this is a topic that we’re expending a fair amount of energy on ourselves; watch this space!
January 18th, 2012 — Archiving, eDiscovery, M&A
As if to underscore our belief that the cloud is set to play a bigger role in all things Information Management-related in 2012, Symantec announced this week that it had acquired cloud archiving specialist LiveOffice for $115m, its first acquisition in eight months (451 research clients can read the full deal-analysis report here.
Though the deal was not a huge surprise — some of LiveOffice’s executive team (including CEO and COO) hail from Symantec, which has for the last year been reselling LiveOffice, rebranded as EnterpriseVault.Cloud – it is a significant endorsement of the cloud archiving market; a sub-sector that we have been following closely for a couple of years (we published a detailed, long-form report on the market in late 2010), but has yet to really come to life.
Symantec, which of course dominates the on-premise email archiving market, notes that about half of all archive deployments now go to the cloud. In this respect, cloud archiving is a market that it simply has to participate in more directly. Accordingly, LiveOffice provides Symantec with a better means of serving the smaller organizations that tend to opt for the cloud model, which requires far fewer skills and resources to set up and manage than on-prem models. Of course, it also means Symantec doesn’t have to be religious about which model it promotes; whether on-prem, cloud or a hybrid of the two, it now caters to all requirements.
Symantec also made an interesting comment that LiveOffice is at the right point in its own development where the application of Symantec’s huge scale can help in growing the business, rather than be a hindrance. This is a refreshingly honest acknowledgement that it hasn’t always got the balance right in the past; buy a company that is too small, and the weight of a giant like Symantec risks starving it of oxygen altogether, rather than fanning the flames that made it successful in the first place.
The question now is whether this move may help spark broader growth of the cloud archiving market. LiveOffice was one of the first cloud providers to archive other data types beyond email, and can now store and index a wide variety of data, including from social media, file servers, SharePoint and even SaaS applications; as more data, workloads and applications move to the cloud, so cloud-based archiving will become more relevant. One big factor in the cloud players’ favor is that email is increasingly going the hosted route, especially for SMEs; if you run corporate email as a service, then you aren’t going to deploy an email archive on-premise.
All in all, we think this is a good move by Symantec, and one that could drive interest in the other cloud-archiving pure plays out there.
October 4th, 2011 — Content management, Data management, eDiscovery, Search, Text analysis
As a follow-up to Matt’s post last week showing where he’ll be speaking during Q4, here’s some more updates of other in the information management team speaking at various events this quarter.
First up I’m chairing and speaking at IQPC’s Enterprise Information Management Exchange in London on October 10-11. I’m speaking to a mainly C-level end user audience about information risk management, moderating a panel on how to make the most of your information assets and brushing off my MC-ing skills to keep the whole show moving along.
Next up I’ll be back in NYC at Text Analytics World giving a slightly shorter version of a similar presentation on October 19 (which I’ll be refining and also presenting at Predictive Analytics World in London on November 30).
On October 24 I’m on the opening panel of Enterprise Search Europe, discussing the issues brought up by the keynote presentation by Funnelback’s David Hawking, among other things
On October 27 David Horrigan will be attending Guidance Software’s Federal Summit in Washington, DC where he’ll be moderating a panel called e-Discovery in the cloud. This is an invite-only one being handled by Guidance, so I don’t have a link unfortunately.
Into November and I’ll be attending the e-Discovery and e-Investigations Forum in London on November 10. There I’ll be discussing the choice available to end users in e-Discovery in a session called: A buyers guide to navigating the info management and e-discovery technology marketplace.’
The following week I’ll be in Munich at IQPC’s Information Retention & e-Discovery Exchange where I’m sitting on a couple of panels – one on social media in e-Discovery and another on technology in this area.
Finally this quarter Kathleen Reidy will be attending Gilbane’s annual gathering of enterprise content management mavens where she’s moderating a panel entitled ‘Get Ready for Big Data.’
We hope to see some of you at one or more of these events in Q4.
September 7th, 2011 — eDiscovery
We have just published our annual report on the e-Discovery and e-Disclosure industries. This year we’ve subtitled the report ‘Crossing Clouds and Continents.’
This reflects a couple of the main themes of the report that are directly related: the rise of cloud computing within e-Discovery and the effect it has on those involved in e-Discovery in terms of how much simpler it makes it to store data in all sorts of locations. That of course then rasises issues of who is responsisble for that data and under what jurisduction it falls. Other issues we focus on in the report include:
- Changes in the legal sector in the US & UK
- In-sourcing & out-sourcing of e-Discovery by corporations and law firms
- European e-Discovery
- Social media
- Bribery, corruption & fraud
- Products & technologies, mapped to EDRM and beyond
- User case studies in healthcare, law & government (financial regulators)
- M&A – both the recent surge and a look ahead to what’s next
- Profiles of 30+ software and service providers
To find out more about it and how to get a copy, you can visit this page or contact myself directly.
August 25th, 2011 — eDiscovery
Not surprisingly, the biggest topic of conversation at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 2011 convention in Nashville is last week’s announcement by Hewlett-Packard (HP) that it was acquiring Autonomy for $11.8bn. The most common reaction–in addition to the rush out the door to buy HP’s now discontinued TouchPad for 99 bucks–was surprise at the healthy purchase price. Although some ILTA attendees saw how the deal might make sense logistically, virtually no one thought the deal made any sense at all with such a high price tag for Autonomy.
Cloud computing–and law firms’ reluctant move toward it–is another big topic, but another trend that seems to be developing as the e-discovery industry matures is its move away from law firms. Many vendors are reporting that five years ago, their businesses were 70 percent or more in law firms, with the remaining 30 percent or less of the business with corporate clients. Vendors now report that those ratios have flipped, with corporate clients now making up the vast majority of business.
Although the e-discovery market may be shifting away from law firms, at least one vendor hasn’t forgotten them. Exterro has announced at ILTA the launch of Fusion LawFirm. As the name implies, the new application is a version of Exterro’s Fusion platform designed especially for law firms.
Other vendors meeting with The 451 Group at ILTA to brief us on their product launches and other announcements are:
- AccessData, which is launching its new early case assessment application, AD ECA
- kCura and Nexidia, who announced their alliance where Nexidia’s audio and voice recognition application will be integrated into kCura’s Relativity platform
- LexisNexis Applied Discovery, which made an ILTA announcement of its new partnership with Equivio to add predictive coding to its platform
- LexisNexis LAW PreDiscovery with the launch of its new early case assessment (ECA) application, Early Data Analyzer
- Nuix, which announced a new version of its platform last month
- Orange Legal Technologies, which did an ILTA launch of PurpleBox, its new collection and ECA tool
- Recommind, which discussed its predictive coding patent, and may have hosted ILTA’s best party at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame
- Wave Software, which announced a new version of its Trident e-mail processing application.
August 18th, 2011 — Archiving, Content management, eDiscovery, M&A, Search, Text analysis
Just after the HP call about its Q3 numbers and the deal, here’s my initial (very) quick take as it’s late here in London:
- This deal is about getting serious about software under Leo Apotheker. It gives HP a real information management story, greatly boosting its presence in the archiving, e-Discovery and enterprise search businesses.
- However, company cultures are not complementary, the HP way is a long way from the hyper-aggressive sales and marketing culture at Autonomy. Maintaining Autonomy as a separate entity run by Mike Lynch proves this and calls into question how much real synergy can be had from such a structure. I cannot see that being sustained.
- This instantly makes HP a bigger e-Discovery player than IBM or any of the major IT firms.
- Product overlap exists in document and records management but gets HP into the web content management and website optimization markets.
- Autonomy has resisted deals over the years as its market capitalization ballooned as it went on its own acquisition binge. Autonomy couldn’t have waited much longer as it would have grown too big to be swallowed by even the largest predator.
- At least Autonomy customers will now have a services organization to call on after they’ve bought the software. Customer support and after sales service has not been a strength of Autonomy.
- This leaves the FTSE 100 with just one software firm of note.
June 13th, 2011 — Data management, eDiscovery, Text analysis
The 451 Group is holding two conference in London later this month.
The first is our European client event, which is being held on Monday June 27 and features three analyst presentations and one from Steve O’Connor, Director of Technology for Parliamentary ICT at the UK Houses of Parliament. The full agenda is here.
Two of the presentations are specifically focused on information management. Matt Aslett is presenting on Total Data, our take on the the increasing volume and variety of data, combined with a greater understanding about its potential value. I’ll be preceding Matt with an overview of information risk management as we see it, focusing on how the increase in information volume and variety heightens the risk environment and what some companies have done to tackle it. Clients of 451 Group can come to the conference at no extra charge as it is included in the price of their annual relationships with us. Non-clients can also come for a fee, please email me for details
The following two days – Tuesday June 28 and Wednesday June 29 are focused on hosting and cloud issues with our Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS). The agenda features a wide variety of speaker, both from 451 Group and from numerous end users in markets including financial services, government, media, telecommunications and transportation.
The highlight for many will likely be listening to, and asking questions of, Professor Brian Cox, the Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University and one of the leaders on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. In the UK he is well known for two massively popular science programmes, Wonders of the Solar System and, in 2011, Wonders of the Universe, the first of which is also now on in the US on the Science Channel. He will be talking about all the things that interest him, and there will be ample time for Q&A.
Seats are selling fast and 451 clients who attend the client event get a discount to HCTS. We also have some discount codes avaiable, so if you’re not a client and would like to attend, please get in touch via email or Twitter (@NickPatience).
I look forward to seeing some of you there!
May 24th, 2011 — eDiscovery
I’m very pleased to be able to announce that we have a new analyst at The 451 Group covering e-Discovery and information governance.
His name is David Horrigan and he will be covering the e-Discovery and information governance markets as part of our information management practice.
He is both a practitioner, having been engaged in numerous e-Discovery projects, as well as professional writer and public speaker in the legal technology market.
Here’s his bio, which is also on our website:
As an attorney and longtime legal technology writer, David brings both law firm experience and years of technology writing to his analysis of these growing industries. He will be advising clients of The 451 Group on the rapid changes in e-discovery as corporations and law firms keep pace with ever-increasing legal and regulatory requirements for information management.
Prior to joining The 451 Group, David served as Assistant Editor and Staff Reporter at The National Law Journal and as a columnist for Law Technology News, writing the long-running Technology on Trial column.
His legal experience in the technology sector includes serving as Counsel for Intellectual Property and Technology Policy at the Entertainment Software Association, and as Director of Legislative and Regulatory Policy at the Magazine Publishers of America.
David has also managed e-discovery projects for the international law firm Covington & Burling LLP, and counseled Brown University on the implementation of its e-discovery and records governance policies.
David holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Florida and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Houston. He is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia.
We welcome David to our team and you can follow him on Twitter at @davidhorrigan
April 6th, 2011 — Content management, eDiscovery, Storage
Two companies central to our coverage of information management are having their own particular – and distinct – issues with shareholders and equity analysts.
Autonomy has been having its run-ins with London’s equity analysts for some time. Not all of them, but a core and increasingly vocal group of them. Generally they regularly question a few things: how the company calculates organic growth of its core IDOL business; cash conversion; and why it hasn’t bought a company after saying it would do and raising £500m of convertible debt to help it do so, back in February 2010. We’re also weighed in on some of these issues.
Autonomy regularly takes on these doubters on its quarterly calls and also does the same during the quarter on its website, which is at least a refreshing change from companies that stay completely mute on such matters. However the answers are often very simplistic. In a post dated March 30, 2011 entitled, “How should we think about Autonomy’s penetration of its end markets, when we attempt to evaluate the opportunity for growth?” that most of the world’s top software companies OEM IDOL and thus are “building their future products with IDOL deeply embedded and paying Autonomy a royalty.” Are they? Autonomy doesn’t distinguish between its two main OEM product when it announces OEM deals, but there’s a big difference between OEMing IDOL and OEMing its document filters. And as we have discussed before we think a lot of the OEM deals are for the latter, rather than for IDOL itself, although we have no way of proving that, except to say that we speak regularly to these leading software vendors and they don’t appear to be using IDOL as their core search and classification engine nearly as widely as Autonomy claims. Ironically given what Autonomy does for a living, a fair bit of the to and fro on the site is semantic-related, e.g. discussion of what “early spring” or “Winter with snowdrops” scenarios mean in terms of the guidance given by the company to analysts. All will no doubt become clearer when it announces its Q1 results, due Thursday April 28.
Over at Iron Mountain, some dissident shareholders have been putting pressure on the company to take on board its slate of directors and eventually turn itself into a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), mainly for its beneficial tax status. We cover what used to be called the digital business – the back up and recovery, e-Discovery, archiving and other software that’s mostly been added via acquisitions over the past few years. But that doesn’t seem to hold any attraction to hedge fund Elliott Management, which owns just less than 5%. It was the company that put forward the slate of directors and advised the company to turn itself into a REIT and in general to focus on its core – non-digital – business. Elliott and even larger shareholder Davis Advisors (it owns a shade less than 20% of the outstanding shares) were annoyed when the company dropped a poison pill on March 23 to guard against a takeover. This week Elliott laid out its grievances in another letter to the board, urging it to reverse the poison pill and generally sit up and take notice of what it has to say.
It’s hard to tel where this will end, but it has already caused disruption to Iron Mountain’s business at a time when it is trying to get some of its digital units – notably e-Discovery – back in track after a very tough 2010. We’ll know if it’s had an effect on its Q1 performance when it announces its results, most likely int he last week of April. The shares, as is common with these sorts of investor challenges have enjoyed a strong run-up, and are currently at or around a 52-week high. The company’s annual shareholders meeting is coming up soon too. Although the date is not yet known, all shareholders on record as of April 12 will be allowed to vote at it. It could get quite lively.
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