Check back for show-time updates when more announcements go public Monday.

Recent M&A

First, an M&A catch-up. 2011 saw several major deals, and 2012 is off to a good start:

• Symantec bought LiveOffice this month for about $115m, after buying Clearwell last May for $390m.
• Autonomy bought Iron Mountain’s e-discovery assets in May for $380m, including Stratify, Connected, and Mimosa, followed shortly by HP buying Autonomy in October for $10.3B.

Recent Releases and Announcements:

• Autonomy recently released three new appliances for e-discovery, search, and archiving built on HP hardware and leveraging Autonomy’s Digital Safe private cloud, as well as HP’s TRIM Records Management, now IDOL-ized on Autonomy’s platform.
• Clearwell pre-announces predictive coding for attorney review in its e-discovery platform.
• EMC-SourceOne’s Kazeon 4.6 release in Q4 2011 revamped with support for new languages and connectors, plus role-based management to improve user-friendliness.
• Nuix releases Defensible Deletion, Visual Analytics, and Contract Discovery, as well as its philanthropic offering Proof Finder.
• Recommind announces 95% growth for the company overall, with record revenue and deal sizes.
• StoredIQ  releases the Defensible Data Deletion solution for the StoredIQ platform, adding to its existing information governance solutions for e-discovery, RM, compliance and storage.
• Symantec debuts the recently-acquired LiveOffice – giving SYMC both the popular Enterprise Vault 10 for on-prem archiving, and a major SaaS archive supporting many data types (not to mention Clearwell).

Trends to Watch

Based on these (and announcements we can’t talk about yet), look for these trends at the show:

• Appliance or Cloud? Yes, please. On-prem immediacy vs. cloud-based capacity, pricing, and infrastructure relief? Users demand both and are getting them, as vendors seek entry-level sales and more potential for growth.

• Cloud, Cloud, and more Cloud- Private or public. Collecting from it or sending data to it.  Inevitable or inconceivable. Look past the hype and controversy for the best ways to leverage the cloud in e-discovery. Brace yourself for collecting from it. Identify fine print to negotiate (or run from) with providers.

• Defensible Deletion -Nuix and StoredIQ tackle defensible deletion with tools for data indexing, classification, and analysis aimed at actionable engagements and reactive ROI – versus the big names marketing proactive information governance archives, ECM, and RM.  A new “Pre-ECA” for Big Data?

• Usability or Bust – Balancing 1. usability, 2. broad applicability, and 3. complex technical capabilities is an art-form, and also key to attracting a wide customer base in e-discovery. Apps, roles, languages, connectors, transparency – the more support the better.  Many players are re-positioning from a channel of service providers to direct enterprise sales, realigning from IT strongholds to legal users, or going global. And any advanced technology must be adequately transparent and court-defensible, raising the stakes.

• Integration and compatibility – or not - LegalTech is a venue for big marketing splashes, not reading the fine print. But note well that between point tool partnerships, acquisition rationalization, platform expansions, and the never-ending pursuit of “end to end,” one size rarely “fits all” in e-discovery.

Consider your requirements carefully and arm yourself with information in exploring options, before and after the show – for example, with ESG’s recent Market Landscape Reports on Initial Case Assessment and the Future of Review. As mama said, “You can’t hurry love.”

E-discovery has already been “in the cloud” since the 80s, if you count service providers hosting client data remotely. But not all clouds are created equal. The multi-tenant “public” clouds from Amazon and Google that run internet and social media apps are different from the “private” clouds traditionally used in e-discovery by service providers and law firms, which typically isolate each client’s data to avoid co-mingling on the same hardware. The trade-off is that without multi-tenancy, private e-discovery clouds generally can’t offer the same capacity-sharing and pricing benefits as public ones.

In today’s price-conscious times, how long can it take? Cloud archives are increasingly moving to public, multi-tenant systems like Amazon for more aggressive pricing. Some legal hold notification services are already there.  Will attorney review tools be the next domino to fall?

Few review vendors I’ve spoken to admit to using Amazon, but that’s changing.  Catalyst Secure Repositories, which hosts data in traditional data centers today, recently told me it plans to move to Amazon Web Services in the future, with documents on S3 and utilities on EC2, available in the US, EU and Asia-Pacific, for international customers.

Are e-discovery customers ready for the journey to the public cloud?  And if so, what does this mean for e-discovery heavyweights like Autonomy, which now claims the largest private cloud in the world, between archiving, review and its other e-discovery applications?  Do enterprise customers have enough faith in Amazon to cut out the middle man?

If and when they do, the pricing pressure we’ve seen lately in the market will only be the tip of the iceberg.

via Document giant might exit digital business – Boston.com.

Here’s a timeline of events:

7 Mar 2011 – Fund manager Elliott Management Corporation wrote Iron Mountain’s BOD and filed a presentation with the SEC highlighting its concerns. Elliot, which owns just under 5% of Iron Mountain’s common stock, criticized the company’s performance and proposed the appointment of four new independent directors. Protesting shareholders want bigger returns faster and an examination of not only the former Digital business, but international investments, too.

10 Mar 2011 – Iron Mountain commented on the Elliott announcement.

15 Mar 2011 – I learn that the Iron Mountain analyst day is postponed in an e-mail stating, “As you may be aware, one of our shareholders is publicly questioning some elements of Iron Mountain’s strategy–and actively seeking representation on our board. Given this turn of events, we feel it is best to postpone our planned event to a later date.”

21 Mar 2011 – In a preliminary proxy filing with the SEC, Iron Mountain urged shareholders to reject hedge fund Elliott Associates’ director nominees and plans to transform the company into a real estate investment trust.

24 Mar 2011 – Iron Mountain readied the poison pill per a filing with the SEC.

11 Apr 2011 – Iron Mountain confirmed it will end its Virtual File Store (VFS) and Archive Service Platform (ASP) cloud storage services because of “modest levels of adoption.” Iron Mountain released a statement confirming that it stopped accepting new customers for its public cloud storage business on April 1 and would officially end the service “no sooner than” the first half of 2013.

14 April 2011 – Iron Mountain CEO Bob Brennan resigned; Chairman Richard Reese stepped in.

19 April 2011 –Iron Mountain announced its strategic plan, which includes provisos to seek a buyer for the former Digital Division; turn over $2.2B in stockholder payouts, including one-time dividends and stock buy-back; establish an exploratory committee to turn Iron Mountain into a real estate investment trust; and approve a BOD nominee from the dissident shareholder ranks, as well as an independent member.

So what’s actually for sale? Iron Mountain’s assets in its Digital business are the people, infrastructure, and intellectual property for its archiving and data protection services, as well as the revenue associated with those services.

People – I’d guess that Iron Mountain talent are already updating resumes and networking for next-step job opportunities. Unless Iron Mountain puts employee retention programs in place or finds a buyer fast, the value of people assets will be greatly diminished.

Infrastructure – It’s not likely that any of Iron Mountain’s worldwide data centers are up for grabs in the sell-off. Scratch that from the list.

Technology – Iron Mountain acquired the base technologies driving its archiving and data protection service offerings—beginning with Connected seven years ago. The R&D team is not focused on innovation, but rather maintenance. While Iron Mountain has tried to remain competitive and maintain pace with market requirements, some of its portfolio is a bit long in the tooth.

Revenue – There’s value in the nearly $250M in revenue these services deliver, for sure. However, Iron Mountain’s business model is subscription-based. There’s considerable “flight risk” with its customer base. With Software-as-a-Service, customers can “take their ball and go home” at any point in their subscription agreement (with proper notice and/or early-termination penalties). Will customers continue investing in a service that’s about to be sold? Did they buy the service for its features or for the Iron Mountain “trusted brand” which goes away with any acquisition.

In perception audits conducted annually, Iron Mountain has consistently reported the industry’s confirmation of “trust” as a top characteristic of the company’s brand. Ironically, Iron Mountain announced the results of its annual audit on April 6, amidst the ruckus. Two key takeaways:

• The analyst community sees the market for digital solutions as the primary growth opportunity for the company; however, Iron Mountain must become more aggressive, very quickly.
• Moreover, the majority of those polled suggest that Iron Mountain should invest more in marketing.

Oops.

Now that its activist shareholders have been placated, Iron Mountain (and its shareholders) can only hope that JP Morgan finds the company a buyer—and fast. Elliott’s actions are quickly turning the possibility of a premium sale into a potential fire sale.

Read more of Lauren’s blog entries at Data Protection Perspectives.

Dell introduced an e-mail and file archive solution.  It is centered around Dell’s DX archive appliance, a highly scalable, content-aware, object-based archive platform.  Because it is object-based, the platform has rich metadata that can be integrated with leading ISVs to create a feature-rich, policy-based, multi-tier archive environment.  Speaking of ISVs, Dell announced integration with both Symantec Enterprise Vault and CommVault Simpana 9, so it is partnered with two of the most widely deployed software platforms.  Dell will resell both in fully integrated appliances sized to meet user needs.

Dell also announced Dell E-mail Management Service, a SaaS offering for e-mail management that has three components–e-mail business continuity, archive, and security.  And the icing on the cake is that Dell announced a variety of services tuned to the lifecycle of customer engagement and deployment–workshops, assessment, design, implementation, and, as previously mentioned, Dell will even manage it for users.

So the announcement covers hardware, software, and SaaS options, blanketed by a variety of services.  This announcement is interesting to me on multiple fronts–each piece alone is a good step–but the thing that jumped out the most is that this announcement really shows a new maturity in Dell’s go-to-market efforts.  It is the culmination of the acquisitions Dell has made these past few years and a more strategic level of partnering than something like, say, the EMC reseller agreement (not to say that was bad–it was brilliant at the time, it’s just not what Dell needs today).  Dell introduced a best of breed integrated solution, with multiple delivery options, wrapped in services to make it easier and faster to deploy.  It’s the whole enchilada, baked and ready to serve, from a company that used to offer you just pieces–tortillas, sauce, beef, and cheese.  It is a natural evolution for Dell in its ongoing growth from being perceived as a leading PC company to a leading IT company.

Icing, cake, enchiladas–I shouldn’t blog near dinner time….

You can read Terri’s other blog entries at IT Depends.

This week’s storms across the US added some much-needed thrills for LegalTech 2011 attendees.  By Day 3 this year it felt even more than usual like we might not all escape the New York Hilton and return to our families unscathed.

In industry news, there was less to write home about.  Many of the show’s over-arching trends were Déjà vu all over again – Mimecast said it best with their Legaltech “Groundhog’s Day” formula .  Some vendors must have gone back into their holes for a year after February 2^nd 2010.

Here are some of the more notable themes and releases:

Cloud-based everything – Several vendors launched cloud-based archiving or collection tools, often as an “as-a-service” on-ramp to downstream processes like review.  Autonomy announced cloud-based information management combining WorkSite, Records Management, Search, Process Automation, and ConflictsManager. Kroll Ontrack demoed hosted repository service Ontrack Guardian. Bloomberg launched Bloomberg Vault, a consolidated hosted archiving and compliance solution.  BIA launched a cloud-based collection tool. Trial Solutions introduced SelfLoader for adding data to its cloud-based review tool at no charge.

Self-service improvements – Many of the cloud offerings were aimed at better legal self-service, still a key differentiator in e-discovery.  Whose fault this is depends on who you ask: according to vendors, it’s “non-technical” legal users to blame, but on the other hand there’s no shortage of poorly-designed tools playing catch-up to the legal use case.  Regardless, better self-service is needed to foster independence from IT, cut review time (and cost) with better workflow, and provide more transparency into outsourced parts of the process for general counsel.  More importantly, it’s vital for vendors to appeal to the legal buyer, when too many aiming at enterprise sales are still geared towards an IT sell.  Products boasted low-click usability makeovers, improved dashboards and single-pane consoles, among them Autonomy and CaseCentral.  GGO launched a “Pro” single-user desktop processing version of Digital WarRoom for under $1000.

Fixed Rate Managed Review and LPO – Others still prefer “full service” to “self-service.”  Service providers are betting big on clients outsourcing part or all of the process, particularly at a fixed rate made possible by contract reviewers and central project management, instead of relying directly on law firms.  FTI’s Acuity hit big in 2010 with fixed rate all-in pricing for managed review, as have more traditional LPO players like Integreon.   DiscoverReady and Huron Consulting made major announcements this year.

Process Management – While service providers are anxious to fill the void for those outsourcing project management, software tools continue to beef up their own capabilities. Exterro launched Fusion v. 4. PSS Systems debuted  post-acquisition as part of IBM. Wave Software announced its purchase of iFramework, integrated last year with Trident Pro.  Other tools added more features for gauging data volume, cost, risk, and productivity across individual or multiple matters – among them Autonomy and CaseCentral.  Legal hold gathered steam as well, following a year of judicial emphasis on preservation and sanctions. kCura appeared behind Method Legal Hold and Relativity v. 6.9, boasting rapid progress in growing its channel (significantly in direct enterprise sales), while Zapproved and Bridgeway continued making their own strides.

Concept search and automated coding– Should culling happen at collection, processing, review, or pre-emptively?  The answer is still “yes,” but advanced search in review was especially ubiquitous this year. Clearwell Systems released “transparent concept search.” Kroll Ontrack released Ontrack Inview 6.5 with Intelligent Categorization. DiscoverReady trumpeted automated review. Recommind added QC sampling to its Axcelerate predictive coding. Equivio boasted more direct law firm and even enterprise sales.  CaseCentral added concept clusters, faceted search,  and visualizations in v. 5 with new search technology.

Integration continues – Major players continue integrating their acquisitions, smaller ones are banding together, and everyone is integrating with more data sources.  EMC announced an eGRC platform integrating IIG information governance, Data Domain disaster recovery and RSA Archer security.  FTI announced Ringtail 8, more closely unifying Ringtail and Attenex.  AccessData is integrating its acquisition of Summation with its e-discovery platform, highlighted in its web-based CaseVantage offering. New partnership announcements came from Digital Reef, Exterro, kCura, RenewData and Wave Software.  StoredIQ announced deeper integration with (and support for) SharePoint.

Education - One highlight was the announcement of the Law Institute, a free education initiative spearheaded by SEC Special Counsel for Electronic Discovery, Patrick Oot and the Electronic Discovery Institute, and sponsored by several industry vendors.

Last but not least, ESG previewed some of our own projects for the next year at our 30+ briefings, which I’ll detail in future posts – stay tuned for more to come.

Not according to much of what I have been reading lately.   Just saw a tweet the other day from a major storage vendor citing a report about the growth of data.  Several months ago another large storage vendor cited the same phrase, same report.  Heck I’ll admit I have written on the same topic several times…so…GUILTY.

To say customers are experiencing explosive data growth is like saying the Pope is Catholic.  Isn’t this obvious?  Furthermore it appears we can’t change this fact either–I’m talking about data growth by the way…not the Pope.

Customers have been hearing that their data is growing for years–don’t you think they’ve become desensitized to the whole notion?  Don’t you think they already know it, if it in fact IS a major issue?  Just do a simple internet search for “Explosive Data Growth” and see what comes up.  ESG has research to show the growth as well.  In our Data Protection Trends Research Report, 58% reported growth between 11-30% annually.

My question is–what makes up this data that continues to grow?  In some cases I suspect there are some digital hoarders who just need some intervention.  On the other hand, data growth may be attributed to business expansion, either through organic or inorganic means–or maybe it is as a result of the social media sites, adoption of blogging by anyone from a child to a corporate professional, and “Gen Y” or the “Echo Boomers” coming of age.  Or perhaps it has to do with something I have been saying for a number of years, “there is now and will continue to be a gap between client requirements and solution capabilities.”  Reflect on this industry for a moment–I can go back 25 years–consider what the challenges were from year to year, season to season.  There has always been this imbalance and to some degree you want this imbalance.  Too much imbalance and the industry is perceived as weak and unstable, too little and there appears to be lack of innovation.  Sounds like a great podcast discussion, I think I’ll get that started (more data).

Okay, we’ve established data is growing, now what?  The data needs to be backed up, yes, the Pope is Catholic.  Does all the data need to be managed all of the time?  I own three vehicles, two cars, and one motorcycle.  When the winter flakes fly, my motorcycle requires a lot less “management” than my other two modes of transportation that get used year round.  So what about that data that just sits there, that hasn’t been touched in six months, a year or more?  What are customers doing with this data?

My opinion is customers do one of a couple things.

1. Nothing, keep on keeping on.
2. Back up the data to tape or “cheap and deep disk storage,” delete it from expensive primary disk and keep track of it in a spreadsheet or, if they are lucky, through their backup app.
3. Leverage a policy-based solution to move aging data between tiers of storage.

The list probably continues on, but for the sake of this blog, I chose 3.

Bottom Line

Let me just cut to the chase here, archive.  Digital archive feels very much like backup/recovery did 15 years ago–not a lot of attention was being given to us backup guys and I see the same phenomenon with archive.  If vendors are smart (and I’m talking to all the online service providers here too), they will look at this “problem” as an opportunity to help customers manage this “inactive” data through archive solutions–taking the data off the expensive primary to some secondary or tertiary tier of storage depending on the data characteristics and requirements.  ESG published research on the Digital Archive Market Forecast which projects worldwide digital archive capacity to have over 300,000 PB by 2015. That is a huge opportunity, considering the 2010 worldwide digital archive capacity is just north of 30,000 PB.  We also break this down by media type (e.g.,  cloud, external disk, internal disk, tape, and optical), and content type (e.g., file, database, e-mail).

Very interesting data, I was quite impressed.  There certainly is a need.

-chapa signing off

You can read David’s other blog entries at Navigating the BaR Scene.

via Cloud email archiving services: Users reveal the good, bad and the ugly.

Overview

Over two-thirds of organizations recently surveyed by ESG said that IT was the primary group responsible for collecting messages and attachments after an electronic discovery request involving e-mail is received (see Figure 1).[1] With e-mail being an extremely popular source of evidence, it is readily apparent that more and more IT departments will pick up yet another responsibility when it comes to managing this vital communication application.

Supporting electronic discovery collections is commonly viewed as just another administrative task that IT staff must perform because they “own” and are most familiar with the technology. In fact, many IT departments do not necessarily know that they are actually involved in the electronic discovery process; they are simply following orders given by in-house counsel.  As such, they do not specifically evaluate any type of e-mail management solution to solve an “electronic discovery” problem. IT does, however, seek out message management solutions that reduce the overall e-mail administration burden because the application must be given the “most attention” as its exposure (everyone uses and relies on e-mail) is extremely high. When e-mail goes down, everyone in the company is impacted. If an executive loses a message, the proverbial IT “fire drill” ensues. And, with 40% of organizations experiencing greater than 20% e-mail capacity growth, message-related storage costs continue to grow. The list continues.

The Vicious E-mail Management Circle

Dealing with electronic discovery-related tasks may be the worst e-mail administrative duty for IT because:

• The events, scopes of requests, and timelines are unpredictable. It is very hard to know when a regulator or litigant is going to request e-mails as part of discovery.  There is no telling what parameters will guide a specific request; some discovery notices call out specific people (custodians), date ranges, keywords, or a combination thereof.  And, more often than not, in-house attorneys want the collections completed as soon as possible so they can start reviewing the information.
• There is more to do than just finding the messages. IT has to worry about things like “chain of custody” where collection processes have to be documented to prove that information has not been tampered with or deleted. There is also a possibility that an IT manager or someone supervising the collections may have to “testify” in a deposition or in court as to how they actually executed the operation.
• E-mail can be everywhere. There are several different locations where relevant messages have to be collected (see Figure 2) and the data may be in different formats.  Searches for messages are likely going to have to be run several times as no data source can be excluded (unless agreed upon by both parties’ attorneys or dictated by the court) or it might look like the company is trying to hide something.

IT can only control the third issue outlined above and most of the time they make it worse rather than better. According to ESG research, 80% of organizations implement e-mail quotas, which are storage thresholds based on the size of a mailbox.  This is done to control e-mail related storage costs and the burdens associated with moving large mailboxes around when storage capacity starts to run out. Smaller inboxes also reduce the risk of storage-related performance issues, which can slow the primary e-mail application’s response time. Keeping mailboxes small also makes it easier to complete backups quicker.

While quotas appear to reduce some e-mail administrative headaches, they actually make electronic discovery processes more difficult. Quotas often force employees to start setting up personal archives (.PST or .NSF files), moving old messages out of their inboxes to avoid triggering quotas. These archives are stored on PCs and file shares and are frequently backed up—even if an employee may delete a personal archive folder, it is likely to be on a backup system somewhere. Nearly half of the organizations surveyed by ESG stored over 2 TB of personal archive message data. The personal archives could be anywhere, which means when a discovery request arrives, IT has to search for messages in several repositories.

Purpose-built E-mail Archiving Alleviates the Burden

Some IT departments hear the phrase “e-mail archiving” and immediately think about messages stored on backup tapes, which does not really make electronic discovery-related work much easier. Archiving e-mails via purpose-built solutions deliver far better results.  Purpose-built archive solutions—delivered as an on-premises application, an appliance, or via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—copy or move messages based on predetermined policies from the primary messaging application into a separate “archive” environment.  Employees can still access the archived messages via a native e-mail application client (Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.) plug-in or a standard Web browser.

With a purpose-built archive solution, IT can still use quotas; however, when a threshold is reached, messages are moved into the archive. IT controls message-related storage costs by deploying the archive environment on a lower cost storage system (when compared to the storage that supports the primary e-mail application environment) or leveraging a SaaS-based offering where e-mails are actually archived with a service provider. The primary messaging application remains within a predefined capacity range, reducing the risk of performance issues and facilitating faster backups.

IT can use quota-based policies or other rules based on age, size, sender, etc. of e-mails to trigger an archive operation.  Regardless of how archiving is actually performed, the biggest benefit is that employees do not need to create personal archive folders to save older or large messages.  In fact, many IT departments disable the personal archive capabilities within a primary messaging application after setting up a purpose-built e-mail archive solution. Others also choose to migrate existing personal archive folders in the purpose-built e-mail archive solution, thereby eliminating these dispersed messages altogether. When it comes time to search for and retrieve messages, they are either in the primary e-mail application or in the archive. With some purpose-built archive solutions having other capabilities such as “search within search results,” search tracking and reporting, legal hold retention management, and others that aid in the electronic discovery collection and initial review processes, IT can complete the tasks much quicker and with fewer resources.

The Bigger Truth

Forty-percent of organizations using a purpose-built archive solution cited “fewer IT staff hours required for e-mail administration” as a key metric to justify their investment.  Most IT departments include fewer help desk calls related to e-mail performance, streamlined backup operations, and minimal storage management operations as part of this calculation.  ESG believes that the 40% figure would likely increase if IT actually thought how about much simpler electronic discovery tasks are when there are fewer places to search for e-mails.

Click here for the PowerPoint slide.

Click here for the full ESG Research Brief, E-mail Archiving Supports IT’s Role in Electronic Discovery. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/08/sources-for-e-mail-messages-requested-for-business-legal-andor-regulatory-purposes/feed/ 0