MerlinOne – Affordable Audio Search and Review?

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-07-28 11:59:50  Every day new products and service bundles enter the eDiscovery market. I know this because of the constant feedback that we get from articles saying, “But we do that! Why didn’t you mention us?” The reality is that I cannot list every product that has guided search, conceptual folders, etc in every article. So I try to pick 3-4 example products with as much diversity as possible. I could have called out Stratify, Recommind and many others in my Guided Search article. The good part about all this feedback is the constant opportunity to be briefed on new versions and products. For many years, Autonomy and Nexidia have had the only enterprise level audio search built for discovery (and I am sure that I will now hear from others). The team at MerlinOne briefed me on their new hosted review platform going live in August. Lo and behold, their offering includes a new, fixed fee option for dealing with large collections of voicemail, meeting minutes and other audio/video collections.

I am always interested in how people and companies stumble into the world of eDiscovery. MerlinOne grew out of the news industry’s need to transfer and manage huge collections of images and media, becoming a leader in the hosted digital asset management field. It is this background managing massive collections of diverse file types for global customers that makes them worth a second look as a new player in the field. Given the low risk tolerance in our industry, I tend to avoid untested platforms and providers without deep experience. But like many other ECM and business intelligence providers, their customers pulled them into eDiscovery to solve a growing problem with a known solution. MerlinOne is sold on a per case basis with a flat load and monthly fee based on total ingested size range of the case. I love the ‘No GB’ theme song, even if the case fees are based on volume ranges.The overall system is an odd mix of advanced features and bare bones functionality. For example, they have an excellent ability to re-unitize PDF files, but little or no control of the basic ingestion of native files (seems to be a back end process). For firms or corporations with collections heavy on audio, video and image files, the search and display functionality could make MerlinOne an excellent value. More sophisticated buyers who need granular control of processing, multi-party review and complex production formats may want to wait for the next release. I really like companies that own all of their own code because it shows that they will be able to adapt to customer feedback quickly.

The current platform may be a first generation application, but it is sprinkled with third generation features and workflow. Just the ability to index audio and video with text and phonetic search that jumps straight to the hits makes this system worth a demo. The search accuracy is dependent on audio quality, but that is always the story with media conversions. They have managed to cover all of the fundamentals with a clean user interface and a streamlined workflow. We have to be careful not to forget that the majority of our cases are not that complicated and there are advantages to a system that makes it hard for a new user to get lost. This hosted offering does not compete with Autonomy’s abilities to index audio and other non-text formats within enterprise environments, but Nexidia now has competition for cases that are dominated by media files.