Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2016-03-13 20:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Last Friday kCura acquired the Content Analyst Company for an undisclosed amount. The CAAT® OEM analytic engine provides deduplication, email threading, clustering and other analytic visualizations for the majority of eDiscovery review and ECA platforms in the Market. kCura’s Relativity already dominates the hosted review market segment and most of their competition has CAAT powering their analytic functions. Are we going to see “iConect powered by kCura” branding? I doubt it. I am betting that the kCura team made a smart ‘cheaper to buy than rent’ analysis of the CAAT licensing fees derived from Relativity. It reminds me of the FTI acquisition of Attenex. Will kCura immediately leverage CAAT licenses against their competitors?
Of course not. kCura is already leading the hosted review platform market, they don’t need to squeeze out competitors when they can make money from them as OEM customers. I am betting that this acquisition is a longer IG play. Content Analyst released their own web based content analytic offering, Cerebarant™ last year. This offering lays the groundwork for broader business intelligence or IG lifecycle tools, exactly what kCura needs to move upstream to the larger analytic market. eDiscovery is a relatively small market in the bigger search/intelligence world. Just look at Palantir, a data analytics company targeting government agencies. Palantir took another $880 million in funding last December with a $20 billion valuation. That is the market that kCura would like to play in and have just made the first step towards.
I imagine that this acquisition might slow down the Relativity integration frenzy by every other analytics provider, but they would be better off taking their piece of the Relativity pie if they can stomach it. I don’t see this as disrupting the eDiscovery market, though it does consolidate kCura’s position at the top of the mountain.
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, SMB eDiscovery, 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.
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