ILTA Snapshots Part II

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-09-14 13:38:01  In order to keep my ILTA feedback as fresh as possible, I have decided to try a combined post that just pulls the highlights for a number of the providers that briefed me at the conference. I expect to follow up most of these highlights with a more in-depth piece after the full demo. I have pretty much given up on trying to do full product demonstrations at conferences. You just do not have the time to do them justice in the midst of the hustle and bustle.Nextpoint brings a true Saas/cloud offering to the market with their Trial Cloud, Discovery Cloud and Cloud Preservation web products based on Amazon web services. Their $25/GB/month flat pricing definitely challenges the established players and makes an interesting option for small firms or companies with matters below the usual hosting cost/benefit thresholds. My experience with raw internet transfer limitations says that Fedex will be making a lot of money for matters over 5 GB in size, but everyone seems to be used to shipping hard drives these days anyway.Interlegis has had a ‘back end of the funnel’ pricing model for their Discovery360 hosted platform for years. This means that you process, cull and search as much as you want to, but only pay for what was actually review. Their big news is Discovery360™ Desktop, a local version that runs on your laptops, workstations and network to do all that front end analysis, search, culling and reporting in your environment. As before, you only pay based on what you export, either directly for Interlegis review or to industry standard load formats. The free installation and processing are bound to be attractive to firms and companies looking for something to scope the collection without breaking the bank.KPMG developed their own review platform over nine years ago called Discovery Radar™, which is slated to release version 4.0 this quarter. This is an in-house offering for KPMG clients, somewhat like Huron’s V3locity© platform. It fascinates me that the raw cost of processing and hosting has driven these global consulting/audit firms to become software development shops. There is no doubt that they have the mammoth matters and expertise to justify serious investment, but it makes me wonder if the real driver was the combination of volume based pricing and slow development cycles that dominated the first generation of hosted platforms. Discovery Radar 4.0 seems to be built for large, complex matters and the in-house development team leveraged the Fulcrum text engine for concept folders and thesaurus expansion.Equivio is most commonly encountered on hosted review platforms where it provides deduplication, threading and near duplicate clustering functionality as an add-on partner. I have already done an overview of their Relevance product while exploring automated review technologies earlier this year. The main message from ILTA was that Equivio is taking Relevance to the left on the EDRM diagram to apply the training rules to culling the non-relevant. I have always liked Equivio’s transparent technology strategy. They expose the system scoring and criteria facets to the human operator and give them control of the risk/cost threshold decision.Just a few more snapshots coming.