Information Management Blog

By Josef Elliott

So the acquisition news today is that Interwoven have become the latest ECM vendor to snap up an e-Discovery player in the US with yesterday’s announcement that they intend to acquire Discovery Mining, Inc.  This follows Automony’s purchase of Zantaz, Seagate’s purchase of MetalLINCS, Iron Mountain’s purchase of Stratify and many others besides.  So what’s this all about, then?  What exactly is e-Discovery and why do the leading suppliers in the ECM and storage world feel the need to enter this market?

Well, the answer is partly about protecting what they’ve already got and partly about trying to get in to new markets.  E-discovery deals with the management and exchange of the electronically stored information (ESI) associated with litigation and Gartner’s latest Marketscope lists a whopping 29 vendors in this space.  And whilst the discipline has been around for almost 10 years, it has really taken off since the changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December 2007. 

These changes increased the obligations with respect to the disclosure of electronically stored information (ESI) by widening the scope of what ESI needs to be disclosed and the format in which it should be produced.

What this means in effect is that the E-discovery tool becomes a major new repository of information in the organisation for the duration of the litigation (which may be many years) and for a significant time before and maybe after.  So now the “traditional” document management and storage vendors need an offering in this area to ensure they retain control of existing information and gain control of additional ESI not currently managed by them.  More documents, more storage, more licences and deeper embedding within the organisation.  Obvious, really.