When last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-mail Active Archiving was published in May 2008, it showed virtually no change from that of the prior year. Symantec remained the only company in the “Leader” category and fully 80% of vendors saw no meaningful change in their rankings. At the time, we observed that if vendors want to move up and to the right, then they need to differentiate, and the most obvious place to do that is in e-discovery. One year later, the 2009 report bears this out. In contrast to last year, there have been significant changes for many players, most notably Autonomy which has broken into the “Leaders” category. What’s driven these changes in the vendor landscape? Primarily, the increasing importance of e-discovery. To quote, Gartner’s report (p. 4): Leading products offer more than just search and packaging, but also provide tools for review and case management. Discovery tools are fast becoming a requirement to play in the enterprise part of the market. This emphasis on e-discovery has clearly helped Autonomy, which “targets the high end of the enterprise market that is looking to manage complex information management and discovery requirements.” (p.8). It bundles the ZANTAZ archive with Aungate Investigator, Aungate Legal Hold, and Introspect, to create million-dollar-plus software packages that can take over 6 months to deploy. The growing importance of e-discovery has also helped Symantec, which has had a two-pronged strategy. First, improve its own Discovery Accelerator (DA) module that enables users to get data out of Enterprise Vault. For example, the latest release of DA finally allows users to do a search within a search, something that many Symantec customers have been requesting for years. Second, provide an API for DA so that other vendors can integrate with it. A handful of vendors have built adapters to the DA API, although I’m not aware of any customers that are using the integrated solution. To Continue Reading: Click Here --------------------------------------------- Source: eDiscovery 2.0 By: Aaref Hilaly

Read the full story originally posted by EDD Blog Online.