Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-11-22 07:27:20Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. My September post looked at the provider sponsorship of Legal Tech New York from 2008-2011 as an indicator of the how our industry has reacted to the economic recession. At the time, I noticed quite a few players who had either quietly disappeared or been acquired in the last couple years. Merger and acquisition consolidation is a sign that eDiscovery is maturing and integrating into the larger corporate technology market. I thought that it would be interesting to make a quick roll call of software or service providers that have either disappeared or been acquired since the recession put the squeeze on the market.
The first market sign that I recall was SPI Global Systems’ last second withdrawal from LTNY 2009 and immediate shut down of their eDiscovery operations. Onsite3 went through a fast bankruptcy and was gobbled up by Integreon. A quick check shows that Integreon has been taking advantage of the economic slow down with acquisitions of Grail Research, Datum Legal and CBF Group. It is interesting how one Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) provider retreats from eDiscovery while another invests heavily.
MetaLINCS (i365) review platform was acquired back in 2008 by Seagate, but finally end-of-life’d the product when it could not get any market traction. Google jumped into eDiscovery with their appliance and then promptly dropped their eDiscovery marketing message when customers realized that not all search is eDiscovery ready.
So here is a fast list of the big acquisitions in the eDiscovery market:
eDiscovery Market Acquisitions
- Attenex by FTI
- CTSummation by AccessData
- CA’s governance unit by Autonomy
- PSS Atlas by IBM
- Trilantic by Huron Consulting Group
- Daticon EED by Document Technologies, Inc
- Serengeti Law by Thompson Reuters
- eDirect Impact by IE Discovery
- CaseLogistix by Thompson Reuters
- Daegis by Unify
- Mimosa by Iron Mountain
- Kazeon by EMC
- Interwoven by Autonomy (big fish)
- Discovery Mining by Interwoven (little fish)
- LitSoft LLC by Precise, Inc
- Kroll by Altegrity
- Discover ready by The Dolan Company
- RLS/LIT Group by Scarab
As expected, the M&A has been primarily driven by the global software providers looking to add eDiscovery functionality into their enterprise systems. Basically, eDiscovery is slowly being recognized as a fact of life for corporations. If you cannot ignore it or make it go away, then you integrate it into your business process to gain efficiencies.