Top E-Discovery Software Vendors

There are two independent analyst reports identifying the top e-discovery software vendors.

The first, published in June 2007, is the Socha-Gelbmann Annual Electronic Discovery Survey. The authors, George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, probably know more about e-discovery than anyone else you are likely to meet. As someone who has filled out their 178-page survey, I can tell you it is excruciating in its detail and incredibly rigorous. According to the report, George and Tom contacted nearly 1,000 individuals and collected detailed data from 115 organizations.

The second analyst report is Gartner’s MarketScope, which is published today (December 2007). Its author, Debra Logan, is fast emerging as one of the leading lights of e-discovery and has great instincts about the market. For her report, Debra tells me that surveyed 30 vendors and checked over 90 customer references.

The results from the two reports are as follows:

Socha-Gelbmann Top Software Vendors (1)	Gartner Top Software Vendors (2)
Attenex	Attenex
Cataphora	Clearwell
Clearwell	FTI
CT Summation	Guidance
Doculex	Inference
FTI	Iron Mountain/Stratify
Guidance	Kazeon
ISYS Search Software	Kroll
LexisNexis	LexisNexis
Oracle	Seagate/MetaLINCS
Zantaz (now Autonomy)	Orchestria
	PSS Systems
	Recommind
	Symantec
	Xerox
	Zylab

(1) Companies listed as “Top Electronic Discovery Software Providers Based on 7 Criteria” (Table 19 and 20), listed in alphabetical order. (2) Companies awarded ratings of “Positive” or “Strong Positive” (Figure 1), listed in alphabetical order.

Why are the lists so different? Primarily because of two main factors:

1. Gartner’s list mixes service providers and software companies whereas Socha breaks them out separately. The Socha report has an entirely separate list for service providers.
   
   
2. Socha’s report was completed 6 months earlier than Gartner’s. In that intervening period, several new players entered the e-discovery market. For example, Kazeon was ranked by Gartner earlier this year a “niche player” (lower left quadrant) in the enterprise search market, and has not been in e-discovery long enough to participate in the Socha study (or, if they did participate, they did not have enough e-discovery customers to gain a high ranking).

Conclusions

The first conclusion to draw from these lists is that any vendor not in them is probably not worth considering for e-discovery. If neither Socha nor Gartner ranked them highly, then the vendor either could not provide compelling customer references or has lost competitive bake-offs to someone who is on the list. Either way, they are best avoided.

The second thing that stands out is how different these lists are. Of the 21 vendors identified by Socha and Gartner, only 5 are ranked as top e-discovery software vendors by both of them. Those 5 are Attenex, Clearwell, FTI, Guidance, and LexisNexis. So, if you are an enterprise looking for an e-discovery solution, it is clear who you should call first.

Finally, it is worth noting that both these analyst reports are relatively new. This is the third annual survey for Socha, and the first MarketScope for Gartner. That speaks to the fact that e-discovery software is a new, fast-growing product area. More and more enterprises are adopting e-discovery software solutions, and asking analysts about them, because they offer such a compelling ROI.

An Eventful Day

Thursday, December 6 was a big day for several e-discovery companies. Starting on the home front, it was Clearwell’s 3^rd birthday and we celebrated by announcing our deployment at Bear Stearns. Looking at where we are now, it’s hard to believe that 3 years ago the company consisted of a few guys with an idea. Today, we have over 100 customers who rely on Clearwell for e-discovery, and we are thrilled to count Ruben, Christoph and the team at Bear Stearns among them.

That same day, MetaLINCS announced its acquisition by Seagate (more on that to follow shortly), and Guidance announced the appointment of a new CEO. Victor Limongelli was promoted from President to the top job after what sounds like a comprehensive evaluation of both internal and external candidates by Guidance’s board. I always enjoy my conversations with Victor and applaud Guidance’s decision.

All in all, an eventful day.

Now, That's Customer Feedback

To the long list of reasons why e-discovery companies should be good to their customers, we can now add one more: because if you don't, they might blog about you and say nasty things. That's what has happened to Metalincs on this blog which carries the intriguing description of "legal software whistle-blower" in its web page address.

I have no idea who this person is, but their comments about Clearwell's e-discovery solution are well-informed and accurate.

E-Discovery Is Taking Off – And Investors Know It

Regular readers will know this blog is about e-discovery and not about my company, Clearwell. That said, every now and then, the two intersect and it makes sense to write explicitly about Clearwell, since our experience speaks to broader market trends.

That’s the case today, with Clearwell’s announcement of 2 significant milestones. First, the company has crossed the threshold of 100 customers using the product to lower their e-discovery costs. Since the technology bubble burst in 2000, I have been involved with several early stage companies that have brought new products to market, either as founder, CEO, investor, or advisor. All have capable teams; some attacked huge markets; none have seen the rapid customer adoption that we have experienced at Clearwell. Nor were they able, as Clearwell has done, to so quickly break into top tier accounts such as BP, Boeing, Cisco, Del Monte and a host of other household names which I am not at liberty to mention.

The second milestone is that Clearwell has closed its third round of funding for $17M. This is a larger amount than planned, and it happened much more quickly than I anticipated. It was driven by the simple investment philosophy that has powered large investments elsewhere: find a large, growing market and pick the winner, as it will likely be worth more than all the others put together.

I see both milestones as significant for the broader e-discovery space. The fact that a company can introduce a product and, a little over a year later, have over 100 customers using it, says that there is huge latent demand. Clearly, everyone from small hedge funds to mid-sized insurance companies to large departments of the federal government desperately want to lower their e-discovery costs. If history is any guide, this untapped demand will be recognized by a large number of existing players who will all repurpose their existing products towards e-discovery. But, again looking at similar phenomena play out in other markets, the space will likely be won by a “pure-play” vendor unencumbered by the baggage of a legacy business. The investment community recognizes this and is increasingly willing to open its check book in the hope of backing that winner.

No doubt, other young companies will raise money to attack the e-discovery opportunity, and other existing players will continue to dress up their generic search or storage solutions in e-discovery clothing. But over the next 12-24 months, a leader will emerge from the pack and will grow into a significant, standalone company – and the others will either sell for whatever they can get, or try to find a different application for their technology.

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.