Kazeon Upgrades E-Discovery Suite, Adds Case Management

E-discovery specialist Kazeon Systems introduced an upgraded version of its e-discovery software suite this week and provided new buying options in an effort to attract more customers during a time of tight IT budgets. The move follows a variety of new licensing options the company introduced earlier this year.

Kazeon is offering modular products that focus on analysis and review, collection and culling, and legal hold management. It also is adding another collaborative application called E-discovery Case Manager to let customers manage a single case from start to finish. All of the modules work off a single software platform and can be integrated into a single workflow process, the company said.

Acknowledging that the bad economy and shrinking IT budgets prompted the company to provide more options, Kazeon VP of Marketing Karthik Kannan said the modular approach should appeal to new customers. "Customers are willing to spend money to solve specific problems, so we made the architecture very modular so they can buy exactly what they need," he said.

Kazeon in January introduced three licensing options to lower the introductory costs of buying e-discovery software. Kazeon had been charging $80,000 for a server license. Under the new pricing models, customers can get started using the company's software for $10,000 with a single- or multi-year license, a usage-based license where the company will charge by the gigabyte, or a license based on a single case or project. Customers can start with one license and move to another as their needs change.

New features in the upgrade introduced this week include the addition of "dynamic concept search" in the analysis and review module, which is designed to help customers home in on specific information by extracting concepts while indexing the information. "If somebody is looking for all information about Jaguar, the system doesn't know at first whether it is the car or the animal. We can fine tune the search as we understand what you are trying to look for," said Kanan. "As you look for information on accidents and highways, then we know you are asking about a car. And can do this on data without moving it to a repository, so an early case assessment like this can reduce the cost of storage and bandwidth needed when moving information."

In the legal hold module, the software can now find information based on case requirements such as guardians, date ranges and concepts. The collection and culling module can gather data from a wider variety of sources, including USB drives, thumb drives and laptops. The company also has added connectors for Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Domino to more easily search, index and analyze content from those popular applications.

Brian Babineau, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a statement that Kazeon's case-based approach can results in considerable cost savings for customers. "By offering a modular solution that addresses multiple aspects of the electronic discovery process such as Analysis & Review, Kazeon enables customers to automate once-manual tasks in a secure and defensible manner," he said.

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