Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2015-05-04 20:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Downsizing eDJ from a market analyst firm back to boutique strategic consulting pretty much took Mikki and I off the speaker’s circuit for 2014. So besides escorting key clients through the LTNY maze back in March, this has been my longest hiatus from conferences in a long time. At last week’s Ipro Innovations event, I did a short 20 minute session on who is moving to the Cloud on the main stage and then a fun session on my key 2015 eDiscovery trends. Both slide decks have been uploaded to the eDJ Group site for members who have taken a survey in the last 30 days.
I took the time to sit in on several sessions covering new IPRO products, channel strategies and customer success stories. My quick take away is that CEO Kim Taylor has a vision and a plan to capitalize on Ipro’s recent large sales to governmental agencies and new channel providers. As one of the earliest surviving eDiscovery product suites in the market, Ipro has never had what I would call strong brand awareness with end consumers. The founders built deep relationships with their service provider channel and seemed to be happy creating new point solutions to meet that demand. At one point I think that I was tracking more than 15 Ipro products/utilities. They still seem to be in love with exciting product names (Allegro, Eclipse, Nucleus, ADD, etc) that I believe actually distract from the ultimate Ipro platform value proposition. Despite the proliferation of new logos, icons and names, the promise of Automated Document Discovery (yes, that is what ADD stands for) should resonate with end consumers who demand one-click workflow with mature templates and options to process and optimize collections for review. Below are some of my impressions and notes:
- Publish cases for mobile Distribution
- Eclipse SE – general eDiscovery toolkit for desktop
- Summation iBlaze displacement option
- multi monitor support
- Only company to do page level tags – eDJ looking to verify
- Starting PST processing at 10 gb/hr from desktop implementations
- Relatively low user annual subscription with discounts starting at 5 concurrent seats
- Overall portfolio has heavy focus on detailed, mature features
- CAAT visualizations, TAR and processing analytics included in base pricing
- eDJ sees some competition between usability vs detail functionality
- Who is Ipro selling to? New vs power users. Maturity vs innovation.
- Workflow automation – ADD automated document discovery
- Faster to review – kill batches and load files
- Too many new brands – eDJ opinion
- Nucleus – central SQL DB across matters and processing/review stages
- IproQ – functional Relativity tab integration.
- App connection with eCapture, scan and OCR
- OCR on the fly with Ipro while in Relativit
Those are just a few outtakes and I am sure that I missed quite a bit with the flurry of releases. The event had great energy without ever feeling like a sales/marketing venue like LTNY can at times. Are well done user conferences the future of eDiscovery education and social networking? Maybe. It was definitely worth attending and I very much enjoyed making new friends and defending my rather strong opinions.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. His active research topics include analytics, mobile device discovery, the discovery impact of the cloud, Microsoft’s 2013 eDiscovery Center and multi-matter discovery. Recent consulting engagements include managing preservation during enterprise migrations, legacy tape eliminations, retention enablement and many more.
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