E-Discovery Options Branch Out

By James Rogers, February 6, 2008 4:45 PM

With users facing tougher compliance and e-discovery demands, vendors are pushing their e-discovery offerings into new areas, such as all-in-one storage/data classification solutions, virtualization, and services designed to forestall internal strife.

Here's a sampling of this week's announcements in this vein:

IBM
IBM is tying a slew of storage, archiving, and business intelligence offerings together into a solution called Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control.

At a press conference in New York earlier today, IBM execs warned that firms face an unforgiving legal and compliance environment, hence the decision to pull a raft of recently acquired products together into an e-discovery combo."The risk of non-compliance is so frightening and incredibly expensive to businesses," said Susan Spector, director of IBM's worldwide storage and data services. "Part of being in compliance is understanding what you have to save, how long you have to save it, and being able to get to it quickly."

The Compliance Warehouse offering combines content management, records management, and email archiving software from IBM's $1.6 billion FileNet acquisition in 2006 with data classification software from IBM's recent $5 billion Cognos purchase and its Novus CG acquisition.

The solution's storage management comes from Tivoli Storage Manager. Compliance Warehouse also includes data migration software from the firm's recent Softek acquisition.

IBM tells Byte and Switch the solution can work with storage hardware from any vendor, although the standard pre-packaged bundle is based on IBM's DS8000, N Series, and DR550 devices.

The vendor has not revealed its pricing model for Compliance Warehouse, which is available now, although execs say that this will be based on storage capacity -- and on which pieces of the solution are already in place at customer sites.Despite the lack of pricing detail, at least one user feels that the solution could spell good news for firms wrestling with compliance issues.

"I think that there's definitely uses for it," says Carl Try, advanced technology manager at Madison, Wisc.-based e-commerce firm Fiskars. "Its a single repository for all that information. Having standard policies for legal documents is key."

The IT manager, who already uses Cognos software within his IT infrastructure, nonetheless feels that it could be some time before he needs to deploy Compliance Warehouse in his business.

"It's not something that we're focusing on now," he says, explaining that most of his firm's business intelligence efforts are based around key performance indicator (KPI) data.

A few blocks away from IBM's Information on Demand press conference, at the LegalTech show, the vendor also announced a partnership with Electronic Evidence Discovery (EED) to run its software as part of the Compliance Warehouse.Zantaz

Autonomy's Zantaz email archiving division overhauled its flagship Introspect e-discovery software today, adding support for virtualization offerings from the likes of VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The vendor, which recently rolled out legal hold capabilities for desktop data, claims that data held on virtual machines is often left out of the e-discovery mix.

"Prior to this, companies were ignoring electronically stored information in virtual environments," says Nicole Eagan, the vendor's chief marketing officer, explaining that it is typically difficult to capture the metadata associated with the virtual data.

By building additional software connectors into the recently launched Introspect 6 Zantaz claims to have solved this problem. A "Collector Module," which requires an additional software license, searches virtual file servers running multiple operating systems and captures key data, according to the vendor.

Zantaz has not yet revealed the additional licensing cost for the Introspect virtualization feature, which was unveiled at today's LegalTech show in New York.Fios
E-discovery services specialist Fios today took the wraps off a consulting service aimed at helping firms manage electronically stored information.

The Information Governance for e-Discovery service examines how electronic data is captured, stored, and disposed of, and aims to smooth ruffled feathers within users' data centers. At a time when many users are finding e-discovery to be a source of tension within their organizations, Fios claims to be able to improve collaboration among legal, IT, and records management staffs.

Fios has not yet revealed the pricing model for its Information Governance for e-Discovery service, which is available now.

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