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The EDRM Midyear Meeting press release included the usual project updates and an important announcement regarding George Socha and Tom Gelbmann passing the leadership baton to convert EDRM into a true non-profit standards organization. This transformation raises many questions about the organization’s goals and has some analysts challenging the use (or misuse) of the seven year old lifecycle model by product marketing and management teams. First let’s take a look at these titles, “Is the EDRM a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None?” and “Abandoning the EDRM assembly line: a legal-regulatory technology market ripe for change.” While these rather evocative titles could lead you to believe that the EDRM is to blame for software companies that have built ‘Frankenstacks’, products that attempt to support too many divergent business tasks. I am not exactly sure what specific products were being lumped into this category. Most providers chasing the ‘eDiscovery Platform’ market have added legal hold notification, project workflows and some matter management modules to either collection or review foundations, but these are all supporting related tasks.

My definition of Dark Data differs from Wikipedia:“Data relevant to a discovery request that is either never disclosed or is produced without contextual information that could affect the interpretation of that data.” My first interview on cloud sources as discovery targets turned up surprising frustration from the savvy eDiscovery Counsel for a national plaintiffs firm. I expected to hear about immature collection capabilities and defendant’s who struggled to preserve or collect from Office 365, SalesForce or other cloud systems. I did not expect that requesting parties might be completely in the dark about where a production comes from or how it was collected. eDJ’s consultants have had too many recent engagements supporting the evaluation or migration of email and files to the cloud to doubt the trend. Microsoft has been touting the rapid adoption of Office 365 with corporate and public sector verticals. Many corporations seem to have moved critical ESI to the cloud without a clear plan to meet eDiscovery and Information Governance requirements.

Businesses go through natural evolutionary periods, growing and changing over time – sometimes minor incremental changes, and sometimes more radical changes. Since we started eDiscoveryJournal almost four years ago, the company has gone through a series of minor incremental changes, all leading up to the more radical change that we would like to announce today: it has come time to retire eDiscoveryjournal.com and replace it with a more unified website at http://edjgroupinc.com.

Indications are that eDiscovery solution purchases are about to become more strategic in nature. A decade ago, it was not uncommon to see non-competitive bids for eDiscovery business because so many purchases were reactive and made under intense time pressure. In the past several months, however, the inquiries from clients have become more intelligent and more specific – a sure sign that folks are getting ready to make more strategic investments in software and services.

eDJ’s new report, “Predictive Information Governance: The Time Has Come,” looks at how Predictive IG works and how it can positively impact multiple use-cases.

Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog on managing the balancing act between eDiscovery and business requirements. The blog identified the differing perspectives of key stakeholders in supporting corporate business goals while maintaining compliance with legal hold and discovery response activities, records and information management compliance, and IT goals and objectives. It also examined three relevant topic areas for corporations where differing perspectives were ripe for analysis. Interestingly, the challenges haven’t changed. Nor have the relevant topics used for example. However, advances in technology have altered the landscape.

My regular readers know that I have spent a lot of time evaluating Microsoft’s initial discovery tools for SharePoint and Exchange. With so many of our clients contemplating enterprise wide migrations of unstructured data to on-premise or Office 365 SharePoint, I have been scrambling to keep up with all of the eDiscovery offerings that have built connectors to support business requirements such as retention categorization, legal holds, investigations, collections and even review on in-place data. Up to this point, our knowledge of the new SharePoint eDiscovery Center has been based on our briefings, demonstrations and meetings with the Microsoft (MSFT) team and client POC environments. eDJ uses Office 365 for our email and SharePoint sites, including our development cycles tracking goals, requirements and bugs. Since we upgraded our SharePoint sites to the 2013 infrastructure, I decided to upload my validation test data sets and some known test data to a secured email mailbox and to a SharePoint document folder to run some initial hands on tests. The MSFT product management team had assured me that there were major upgrades to the 2013 FAST index that addressed many of the search issues that I found in my Exchange 2010 testing. I took an attitude of ‘believe it when I see it’ in those early briefings and was pleasantly surprised with my initial tests of known file types and search terms when compared to dtSearch, X1 and Symantec’s Enterprise Vault/Discovery Accelerator. That’s right, the 2013 FAST search may be good enough for selective preservation or collection.

In a recent eDJ Reviewed briefing session, Geoff Bourgeois (CTO of Acaveo) highlighted the Smart Information Server’s rapid installation by pointing out that all the only preparatory requirement was a single service account with essentially “Superuser” access rights to every data source that you want to see, search or collect from. Having sat through hundreds of product demos, I know that it takes nerve to do a cold installation, configuration, search and collection in a one hour demo on a live remote environment. It occurred to me that every enterprise discovery collection system on the market assumed that the corporate IT group would give Legal/Compliance full access rights. I have observed increasing tension between IT, Security, Legal and other stakeholders over these ‘keys to the data kingdom’. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was the first big access rights wake-up call to IT. Every new article on massive data breaches (example Target stores) drives IT/Security to slam the gates of the corporate castle and scream “None shall pass!”

At its most basic level, this business model shift is really a subtle one away from the broken traditional analyst model to one of market-makers that cover a select number of vendor companies (as opposed to trying to cover all 500+ providers) and work on the ground with consulting clients. The hope is that this will actually be a more beneficial model in that the research-on-demand element will lead to producing more timely, relevant reports that help our clients do their jobs.

Recommind hit the market hard in 2011 as one of the earliest predictive coding (PC) offerings. They garnered a bit of market backlash for their high profile announcement to broadly enforce their PC patent but seemed to shift their focus to Information Governance corporate sales in 2012. Recommind’s latest round of funding for $15 million in September of last year seems to have coincided with a return to eDiscovery along with a quiet turnover of key management. Indeed, Axcelerate 5 represents an entirely new HTML5 application layer on the CORE platform infrastructure to address adoption complexity and increase usability and accessibility. This makes sense when you learn that the cloud based Axcelerate On-Demand represents the majority of Recommind’s revenue. It feels like Recommind is doubling down on eDiscovery while waiting for the corporate market demand for enterprise analytics and Information Governance to catch up. The overall take-away is that Axcelerate 5 is a ‘new’ review product aimed squarely at customers seeking a hosted review platform with mature linear and PC capabilities.