Symantec’s “E-Discovery Connectors” For Enterprise Vault: What Are They and Why Should You Care?

Today, Symantec announced 3 connectors for Enterprise Vault, for analytics, review and content collection. According to the announcement, these will “provide tight integration with third-party case management, review, analytics, forensics and desktop collection tools.”

The idea that archives should integrate with third party products is one I whole-heartedly support and have written about before. My company, Clearwell, has been working with Nick, Scott, and the gang at Symantec on this for over a year. They tell us that we were the first to integrate with Enterprise Vault and, to our knowledge, we are the only ones who have deployed fully integrated e-discovery solutions with Enterprise Vault at several enterprises.

Having said all that (and climbing down from my soapbox), I think Symantec’s customers will need to read this announcement very carefully to understand what it means. To give them a helping hand, let me translate it from corporate-marketing-speak into plain English:

Symantec is releasing 3 connectors which enable customers to ingest files from EnCase and export files to Summation and Ringtail. It is also exposing a new application programming interface (API) so that third-party vendors can more easily build their own connectors to Enterprise Vault.

At this point, most people’s eyes glaze over and they ask “who cares”? Surely, only techies get excited about something as esoteric as a new API. But as the recent excitement over FaceBook’s API has shown, opening up a platform – even in a limited way, as Symantec is doing – can unlock tremendous value. For those customers with Discovery Accelerator v.7.5, the new API will have a huge impact for 2 reasons:

1. It makes integration with Enterprise Vault much easier, so lots more vendors will do it. In their press release, Symantec mentions a handful of companies who are building connectors to the new API and I’m sure more will follow. This increases customer choice, and makes it more likely that Symantec customers will be able to select related products that closely fit their needs;
   
   
2. It enables enterprises to have a smooth workflow across all aspects of e-discovery, from collection/preservation to analysis/review to production/presentation. For example, companies can now collect information in Enterprise Vault, preserve it by placing a litigation hold on key information via Discovery Accelerator, and then seamlessly hand off that information to a third party application (like Clearwell) for review and analysis. This saves a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on importing/exporting data from different systems, and reduces the risk that something gets lost in the shuffle.

Net net: companies do well by giving customers what they want, and customers want end-to-end e-discovery solutions. Symantec is not the only one to have figured this out; stay tuned for more announcements like this from other archiving vendors.

Open Platforms in E-Discovery

Most large companies face a dilemma. Should they open up their products and invite others to build features on them, creating a “platform” or ecosystem around themselves? Or would that be inviting the proverbial fox into the hen-house, meaning they should instead prevent others from integrating with their product or leveraging it to create add-on functionality?

In the internet world, there is no doubt about the answer: throw open the doors via easy-to-use APIs (“application programming interfaces”) and let a thousand flowers bloom. That’s what FaceBook did a couple of weeks back with their announcement of the FaceBook Platform, and it has already led to hundreds of new applications for their users. It is what Skype did so effectively, creating a mini-industry around themselves of voicemail, skins, ring-tones, and more. Even eBay, which has jealously guarded its feedback ratings and has habitually crushed smaller companies in its cross-hairs, is embracing the open platform mantra, announcing this week that third-party companies can build features that work with eBay in new ways.

By contrast, telecom companies live in a world of closed standards. Even in the wireless industry, which is arguably the most competitive part of the telecom world, the carriers (Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) exact a heavy toll on any application trying to reach their handsets. As friends in the industry tell me, “There’s a reason why there has never been a billion dollar mobile application company.”

In e-discovery, the large technology vendors like EMC, HP, Symantec, and ZANTAZ face the same choice. Their email archiving products store huge amounts of data. Should they let 3^rd party e-discovery software analyze that data, giving their customers more choice? Or should they slam the door shut, and try to force customers to use their own proprietary e-discovery applications?

The answer, it seems, depends on what they want to be when they grow up. As the market leader, Symantec is confident enough to open its archive (Enterprise Vault) to 3^rd party applications while offering customers its own Discovery Accelerator for litigations holds and some document review. Similarly, perhaps because of its powerful brand, HP focuses on storage optimization with HP RISS and partners with e-discovery software, often with huge savings for its customers. On the other side of the coin, smaller companies like ZANTAZ and Mimosa see themselves as e-discovery companies: they seek to leverage their storage products to get customers to also buy their e-discovery applications.

In the long-run, my feeling is that any archive of any stature will have to adopt open standards. Customers will demand it, and (unlike telecom companies) the archive vendors do not have the market power to resist. Over time, they will also come to appreciate (as HP and Symantec do now) that enabling 3^rd party applications to analyze the data they store is to their advantage, since it creates a powerful, additional incentive to store more information in the archive.

What is E-Discovery 2.0?

In a previous post, I wrote about the forces transforming e-discovery, a phenomenon that has received increasing attention from the press, most recently in this week’s Economist magazine. While everyone agrees that something big has changed, and (generally speaking) on the reasons why, people struggle to put their finger on exactly what e-discovery has become.

That’s why I think the concept of “E-Discovery 2.0” is so helpful. Analogous to Web 2.0, E-Discovery 2.0 is a set of new processes, technologies, and services that enable companies to manage huge volumes of data, lower costs, and meet tight deadlines.

New Processes

When e-discovery meant handing over a few boxes of paper, companies did not need much of a process. But in today’s world, where it involves terabytes of data, teams of reviewers, and precious little time, it is a very different story. To cope with the growing volume and complexity of e-discovery issues, companies have had no choice but to adopt new processes. These include:

• Collect and Preserve: Most companies have now established procedures so that, when the need arises, they can collect all data relevant to a case and ensure that it cannot be changed or deleted.

• Analyze Up Front: When presented with more work than can be done, a company’s only option is to work smarter, not harder. That means analyzing the collected data up front, to cull it down to only those emails and documents directly relevant to the case at hand.

• Collaborate Efficiently: E-Discovery has become a team sport. And whenever you have a team, you need a playbook, or a process, to ensure work is not repeated and that everyone is marching towards the same goal.

New Technologies

If technology created this problem, by making electronic communication so pervasive and voluminous, then it can also solve it. In recent years, several new technologies have arisen that enable companies to store and sift through their data to fulfill e-discovery obligations. The most significant of these trends include:

• From tape to disk: As the cost of disk storage has continued to decline, more and more companies are abandoning tapes and instead keeping their data online. Email archiving software optimizes for storage efficiency, allowing companies to keep hundreds of terabytes of data readily available for e-discovery.

• From search to analysis: Basic keyword search has evolved into sophisticated analysis technology that mines email meta-data for relevance, links messages together into discussion threads, and groups them by topics. These analysis applications allow users to sift through millions of messages in minutes, to rapidly identify, tag, and export relevant data.

• From closed systems to open standards: Until recently, technology providers made no effort to integrate their applications, leaving customers to fend for themselves. But that has started to change. Symantec Enterprise Vault and HP RISS now have open APIs, creating pressure on others to follow suit. George Socha’s Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), a standards body, has received widespread support, accelerating progress towards creation of an open e-discovery platform.

To anyone working in litigation support, legal, or information security, all this is quite unremarkable. Of course they use technology to address e-discovery. Obviously, there has to be a process. From the company’s perspective, e-discovery has become no different to HR or finance – it is a core competency, part of doing business.

And that, perhaps, is the most remarkable thing about E-Discovery 2.0 – in only a few short years, it has become so widespread and deeply entrenched within the enterprise, that people barely notice it.