Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2016-01-04 19:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Enjoy my ad hoc observations and opinions on last year’s market and the trends that I am watching:
- Dramatic, transparent M&A activity. >$2.5 B compared to $92M in 2014. Even if you remove $1.6B from acquisitions of Kofax and Aderant as being eDiscovery adjacent, we still had 800-1000% investment growth.
- Massive, slow migration from enterprise data centers to outsourced private cloud, Office 365, Google Docs and other SaaS/IaaS solutions.
- Maturing analytic offerings slowly expand from simple PC/TAR to cover wider eDiscovery lifecycle usage cases. Adoption slowed by lack of industry standards and expertise to run these systems.
- Declining margins in commoditized processing/hosting revenue. Seeing lowest $/GB pricing yet in bids.
- Smart service providers broadening their value proposition with direct managed service contracts to corporations. Lots of inquiries, but still early for the conversion from machine time back to selling real expertise and services.
- Microsoft making inroads in corporate eDiscovery market with in-place preservation/collection and now making Equivio analytics available to highest tier of Office 365 customers. Initial cloud integration available to public 11 months from acquisition.
- Discovery on mobile devices becoming more common, but weak preservation/collection/review solutions keeping it from becoming standard discovery practice. Law enforcement leading the way with practical, remote acquisitions and trained personnel.
- Law firms struggling with eDiscovery management approaches: outsource, insource, managed cloud technology or pure cloud SaaS providers. Do firms practice law or provide legal technology for clients?
- Consolidation in established matter management platforms while many new cloud solutions with exciting analytics pop up. Is matter management a real market or a feature set?
- Relativity dominates hosted review platform market. Creates differentiation opportunity for Ipro, iConect, Catalyst and other review platforms. When everyone hosts Relativity, how do you differentiate?
- Small number of functional self-service cloud providers tackling the SMB market opportunity.
- Provider marketing department launching certification and education initiatives.
- eDiscovery career opportunities are shifting to require higher skills and experience.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a ‘Good Karma’ call. His active research topics include analytics, mobile device discovery, the discovery impact of the cloud, Microsoft’s Office 365/2013 eDiscovery Center and multi-matter discovery. Recent consulting engagements include managing preservation during enterprise migrations, legacy tape eliminations, retention enablement and many more.