A review of the major eDiscovery vendors earlier this year at Legal Tech in New York City has led me to believe that those of us hoping to get a peek at the next generation of solutions for the space will have to wait a little longer. While some well regarded solutions and services address the requirements within a legal department, a smooth e-discovery process as defined by the EDRM framework needs to rely on many other architectural, technological or service-based components to function adequately.
The problem is not trivial. Lots of smart people have been working hard to solve inherent end-to-end problems that range from lack of scalability through integration woes, unbridled storage growth, inflexible policy management and auto-classification engines, and inadequate search capabilities, each seemingly coming from a different angle. This situation has appertained ever since the first group of users started searching for help to solve their compliance and risk mitigation requirements to keep the regulators and opposing litigants at bay.
Vendors and service providers understandably responded with solutions that were created for other purposes. But, as we soon discovered, these were not well suited to sift through millions of email records located on multiple types of storage media, accessed over constrained networks, and perhaps distributed throughout a corporation’s IT assets - or even beyond to employees’ personal computers and storage devices. These systems were the first generation offerings. Unfortunately, many of these FirstGen system components are still an integral part of today’s offerings.
Most legal and IT teams are in a reactive mode when it comes to acquiring eDiscovery, archiving, and retention solutions. This is understandable given today’s regulatory and litigation environment. However, buyers are becoming more sophisticated in the space and are beginning to expect more from their vendors than integrated solutions that one could argue are made up of outdated FirstGen components rather than a unified solution architected and built from the ground up.
While integrating eDiscovery, message archiving, and enterprise search with content management and collaboration tools would seem like a natural fit to fulfill business productivity dreams, I fear this is too much of the cart before the horse. The only logical rationale for acquiring this set of solutions is to acquire customers and some smart applications design people and to knock out potential competitors. I don’t see how it serves the customer’s best interests.
Action Item: eDiscovery and archiving vendors need to tackle the real problems users face with their existing solutions and offer major enhancements or, better yet, NextGen replacements for outmoded FirstGen solutions. The market needs truly unified, scalable, enhanced solutions, not more integration of older systems.
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