A burst of activity has been triggered in the e-discovery sector with Autonomy, CommVault, Iron Mountain Digital and Open Text using this week’s big US legal sector tech trade show to unwrap new or upgraded product and service lines.
Prompted by recent changes to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and a growing need worldwide to preserve electronic information as potential evidence, businesses are having to look long and hard at their e-discovery provisions.
The process entails more than storing and securing email records. It can involve any one of a broad series of procedures in which electronic data is sought, located, secured or searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case.
Data of all types can serve as evidence, something that can cause huge problems for IT managers tasked with trawling enterprise assets for specific evidence held as text, or in an image or calendar file, on a database or spreadsheet, on a website or even in an audio file.
Archive and search software are key elements, and form the backbone of products such as CommVault’s Simpana eDiscovery, part of a suite that helps IT departments control data growth through de-duplication.
The flagship Simpana process and workflow engine has undergone a major refit, with version 8 figuring as the biggest software release to date for the supplier. It includes some 140 new features intended to streamline information management tasks, especially in the areas of data de-duplication and recovery management.
Meanwhile, market heavyweight, Autonomy Corp has unveiled a new audio eDiscovery addition to its Zantax system that will help investigators identify speakers, search for keywords or run conceptual searches across stored audio files.
Interest in e-discovery has surged in the past two years and Gartner notes that spending on e-discovery software technologies and services is forecast to grow between 25-35% annually through 2012.
On the services front, Iron Mountain Digital has said it will launch a new escrow service in support of e-discovery cases.
The company said that there is an inherent conflict of interest between parties during the discovery phase of litigation, and its Discovery Escrow service allows them to safely comply with the discovery provisions related to intellectual property litigation. It builds on the extensive secure data protection vaults of its parent company.
Also announced to coincide with the legal show, document management software supplier Open Text announced it would open its eDiscovery toolset to sites using its Open Text eDOCS system so that they can integrate e-discovery processes within their broader ECM routines.
