Purpose Built Cloud Tools – Exego 2.0

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2011-06-29 13:47:40  As I was walking through Planet Data’s latest hosted offering, I was struck by the freedom that web based applications have to assemble key features to support specialized workflows. After all, if you have all the basic functions, it is merely a matter of presenting them in a clean set of web pages. We tend to forget that eDiscovery is still relatively new and the vast majority of our actual software users are still just getting up to speed on the technology. Litigation support staff, service providers and consultants live and breathe all this, so we know the context and can navigate a crowded graphical user interface (GUI) full of mysterious icons and mouse-over terms of art like dedup, fuzzy, family, etc. The effort to create stand-alone traditional software that had to function in diverse environments and support a wide variety of usage scenarios produced highly complicated, crowded feature toolboxes such as Summation. Exego Early Cost Assessment is a good example of how cloud development can create a streamlined workflow to meet a specific set of requirements.We have seen a proliferation of service providers bringing SaaS and traditional software to the market in the last two years. The serious limitations and cost of processing and review suites three to five years ago practically forced most national level service providers to become software developers to meet the market demands. ECA (Early Case Assessment/Early Data Assessment/etc) was all the buzz at LTNY 2010, but the market is still confused as to exactly what it means. Barry Murphy tackled this in his recent ECA research report. It is good to see a provider bring together the critical functionality within a clean workflow interface without giving in to feature bloat. Planet Data built Exego on top of their proprietary Cerulean processing engine to give customers immediate access and control of collections before they moved into full review. The workflow is intended to support a power user in identification, filtering and analysis with a mature set of search tools such as automatic tagging, parent/child date differentiation and aggregated search across multiple text extractions to deal with differences in proximity and hidden text handling.

Even with the recent market consolidation acquisitions (Clearwell, Atlas and Summation), I still look to the service providers to drive innovation and bring purpose built cloud applications to the underserved small-middle business market. Global enterprise software companies will continue to focus on public corporations with a heavy discovery profile. They have established relationships with these relatively mature customers and see an easy upsell opportunity by adding new offerings to their portfolios. But the middle market players do not have the infrastructure, personnel or capital budget to bring enterprise class eDiscovery technology in-house. Cloud offerings can fill this market gap with nimble, specialized solutions with a low entry threshold while the service providers transition off of the volume based model to a true value based project management model. The right fit is not always having all the RFP boxes checked. Sometimes it is having the key features in an approachable interface at the right price.