Relativity’s acquisition of VerQu makes a lot of sense from the corporate RelativityOne customer perspective. Once integrated, the VerQu Hydra connectors have the potential to dramatically expand the scope of holds, in-place searches and collections. The pandemic has escalated adoption of Teams, video conferencing and a myriad of collaboration platforms that Hydra already gives customers access to. In a happy coincidence, VerQu was on a recent RFP that I conducted that gave me a better appreciation for the breadth of their tech and services. Relativity is acquiring more than just fancy connectors to feed data into RelOne. They are adding deep expertise in enterprise content management that can support archive migrations, retention initiatives, document management solutions and more. Despite the reasonable price of Relativity Legal Hold and Trace, Relativity’s dominant hosting channel partners have kept brand perception focused on large matter review.
The VerQu acquisition shows corporate direct customers/prospects that Relativity is serious about moving to the left of the EDRM with RelOne. That means expanding their data source access beyond M365. Many of my calls and recent engagements have focused on managing the discovery risk/cost of the professional workforce transition to full/partial work from home. 72% of Doug Austin’s recent eDiscovery Trends survey respondents have been working remotely in the pandemic. We are all using Teams, Zoom, Slack and other collaboration apps to make this work. Where goes the data, discovery shall follow. These are some of the same reasons behind Exterro’s acquisition of AccessData. However, I feel that VerQu brings a lot more potential value to the corporate discovery market than AccessData’s portfolio. How many investigation or review platforms do you need? In the end, there can only be one.
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