Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2011-09-01 10:20:22Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Now that I have had a couple days to digest my whirlwind of Nashville ILTA 2011 press briefings, I wanted to get you my impressions on the memorable highlights. My first impression was, “OMG everyone has an iPad!” Really. Given the amazing prevalence of the tablets in the audiences of my sessions, I was not surprised that Recommind has just released an optimized mobile interface for their Decisiv email management tool product. Howard Sklar (Recommind) says that they wanted to get ahead of the blurring the line between personal and professional lives. The service providers seem to be feeling the pressure from corporations to mitigate roller-coaster discovery costs with fixed fee and managed service offerings. Just as legal hold features were the hot add-on at LTNY in February, flexible work flows seemed to be the hot feature as providers are gearing up for the end of year release cycle.
Keith Conley (Exec VP DTI) reports that the EED integration is pretty much complete. The merged companies are still selling EED’s Discovery Partner application, but DTI offers a wide selection of review platforms to meet client requirements. It is an interesting strategy that seems to be paying off with corporate contracts slowly converting to actual onsite managed services.
AccessData has jumped on the ECA appliance band wagon with AD ECA starting at $15k with no per GB fees. More exciting is the long awaited rebuilt Summation enterprise coming in October. Loyal customers have been watching to see how AccessData would redeem the venerable foundation review platform. I am hoping that they have managed to transplant the best functionality of AD Summation onto a stable, scalable architecture.
Wave Software seems to be betting that workflow from their Framework acquisition and heavy connector development will enable Trident Pro to own the customer interface. The strategy could pay off if it leads to an actual ‘eDiscovery Platform’ functionality.
Dave Hunt (CEO C2C) believes that ArchiveOne’s ability to directly connect to PST files in place gives them a strategic advantage in eDiscovery preservation collections and PST migrations. As I am currently supporting several large PST elimination initiatives, the idea of direct ingestion without having to stage the PSTs has definite appeal. However the devil is in the details. I always stress serious testing of any application that has been ‘repurposed’ for use in legal matters before you can assert reasonable faith that it meets your requirements. Still, for a smaller UK based player, C2C seems to be stealing some big opportunities from the archiving market leaders. Of course, the company is based in Reading England, the home of Enterprise Vault.
iCONECTnXT is finally making the jump from Oracle to supporting SQL databases. The development team is working hard to release a new HTML5 based GUI.
Surprise! kCura jumps into the predictive coding fight with Relativity Assisted Review. Just like their Method legal hold module, this is another application that sits on top of Relativity to provide expanded workflow. It leverages Relativity Analytics (Content Analyst), which may cost you more if you are still on a per-GB license, but I really like the usability and relative transparency of the workflow. Relativity also released the new Fact Manager application which is free to all kCura customers and was driven by the user community development of case and fact management systems on the Relativity platform.
Colligo is a Sharepoint based document management application aimed at legal departments. Think of it as a way to classify and manage email in Exchange or Office 365. Although peripheral to eDiscovery, I was happy to see a lower cost alternative to EMC’s Documentum. With our recent growth and expansion, I have been working to move us onto Office 365 along with a central secured web content management repository. It is nice to see these kinds of offerings that allow a SMB to reach enterprise level functionality without a heavy investment.
Recommind certainly raised a lot of eyebrows with their recent predictive coding patent announcement. I certainly wondered if the aggressive market move would affect Recommind’s sales. Howard Sklar made a concerted effort to set the story straight by telling me that Recommind’s July revenue surpassed their Q1 revenue. They do intend to “judiciously enforce” potential patent violators, but we shall see what that means now that Relativity has demonstrated that a review platform with simple content clustering can implement predictive coding without resorting to more complex technology. I also want to do some hands on analysis of the competing methodologies. Definitely on my research agenda.
I had good briefings with many more providers who are deep in their release cycles aimed at new releases prior to LTNY. Many have interesting road maps and offerings on the board, but I will call them out as they are available. We completely booked up for briefing sessions this year, which kept me scrambling. If I only got to wave at you in passing in Nashville, please drop me a line at Greg@eDiscoveryJournal.com with your impressions of the show or any new products.