Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-09-17 14:17:54Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Here is the last batch of takeaways from my briefings at the recent ILTA 2010. I have been able to schedule deep dives on some of the new offerings, so I hope to bring you more details on the new toys.
Scarab Consulting seems to be reinventing itself as a managed service and dedicated consulting group focusing on long term relationships with corporations. I spoke with Tom Tigh, managing partner of their eastern region, about this move away from volume based pricing to retainer based relationships with a combination of in-house and Saas platforms. He spoke of their consulting model to take clients through a 2-year discovery maturity growth cycle. I was encouraged to hear that they are staying out of software sales, an important decision for consultants who are supporting technology implementation initiatives.
AccessData has recently acquired Summation from Wolters Kluwer, in case you had not heard. I briefly spoke with Brian Karney, President & COO, about the challenges of turning around a foundation product that has been relatively stagnant for years. He has ambitious plans for the Summation product line and a good track record for delivering on rapid development cycles. This gives the vast body of Summation customers hope that their product experience will stay relevant. We shall be watching the production releases closely.
BIA has several product/service offerings covering corporate identification, preservation, collection and processing. They too are transitioning from volume based pricing to simpler enterprise licenses and fixed fee $1,000/custodian models. Their DiscoveryBOT live file collection system seems to be similar to offerings from Guidance, AccessData, HSSK, Microforensics and others. BIA’s Solis product wraps that collection functionality with logged workflow for custodial interviews, custodian self-designation of potential ESI, and data mapping features. Like many service providers, BIA seems to have grown their in-house tools into real productized offerings. I look forward to digging into the actual software soon.
Informative Graphics provides document and image viewing and redaction software that is OEM’ed into many leading discovery and enterprise content management products. HIPAA and new consumer privacy initiatives have put pressure on litigants to redact/remove personal health and financial information from productions. Redact-IT goes beyond black boxes on an image to find and remove the underlying hidden metadata based on rules and text patterns. Even in this age of consolidation, there seems to still be room for highly specialized products that tackle complex issues.
Guidance continues to expand their product line with remote collection and Cybersecurity offerings integrated into their new EnCase eDiscovery Version 4 platform. They have divided the user interface into a web-based application for the legal team and a more powerful administrative client for litigation support to manage collections and productions from. Although this platform seems much more user friendly than prior versions it lacks cross case single instance storage, filters and searches to support many corporate usage scenarios. It could offer a lot of value and functionality for EnCase Enterprise customers or regulated litigants with large collections of forensic images.
Index Engines is my last snapshot from the show. The little engine that could has brought tape restoration to the masses and put a serious dent in the profits of restoration providers like RenewData or eMag. Now they seem to be daring to tilt at the giants of enterprise search with performance claims of 1 TB/hour indexing speed across multiple storage platforms. Since open competition is good for the consumer, I say more power to them. There is a lot more to search than index speed, but with many counsel just now tackling search terms this may be the right kind of offering at the right price for the market. The secret to the incredible speed is reading the binary content of the files straight from the media without having to open or view them through Stellent’s viewer or Microsoft iFilters. I have tested other indexing applications that used this approach and found many challenges with compressed, encoded and encrypted file types. Index Engines has a lot of experience with these obstacles from their tape products, so they may be able to produce search results comparable to traditional explosion and rendering products.
That wraps up my crazy 48 hour briefing barrage in Vegas. Now that ILTA has gone more mainstream, I hope to be able to spend more time there next year.