Guidance Software finds itself in the news after an article on Cassondra Todd’s suit by Jessica Mintz of the Associated Press is carried by major news services including FOXNews. In this case, the plaintiff, Todd, was able to produce emails that were not produced by Guidance. Guidance maintained an email archive but a search index became corrupted more than a year before litigation began making the data not easily accessible even though it still existed on backup tapes. It appears the not easily accessible data was not identified until after Todd was able to produce email not found by Guidance.
One of the technology issues in this case is that some email archives maintain many non-overlapping, atomic search indexes. Often times, one or more of these indexes will become corrupt or otherwise unavailable. When this happens, data handled by that index may simply not be returned as part of an E-Discovery search. Organizations engaged in E-Discovery may now wish to request an index corruption log listing inaccessible search indexes as well as the email covered by those indexes as part of their E-Discovery protocol.
Another question is whether the emails were accessible via another method such as a SQL query search. Many email archives use different technologies for fulltext indexes (e.g. Lucene, dtSearch, Alta Vista, etc.) and for relational data (e.g. MS SQL, Oracle RDBMS, etc.). Even if the fulltext index failed, a SQL query may be able to show how many emails were in the archive during a certain time period and associated with certain custodians and subjects.
There is a limited amount of information available in this case; however, the players and technology issues make it with studying. A brief timeline of this case has been assembled based on the available, but incomplete, public information for a quick overview of the case.
25 Oct
Posted by John Wang as SpringCM
SpringCM is offering a two year free trial of their SaaS ECM solution for qualified customers. The market for enterprise software is going to be challenging for the near term so this is a good time to get organizations familiar with the product. Another challenge facing SpringCM is Gartner’s decision not to include SpringCM in the annual ECM Magic Quadrant which just came out for 2008.
SpringCM is adding customers and winning acclaim (KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Products of 2008); however, SaaS ECM is still a very minor part of the overall industry and major players are entering the market. Gartner estimates SaaS and open source solutions combined account for less than 5% of the software license revenue for ECM. One reason for the slow penetration is the need to integrate ECM solutions into existing infrastructure which can be difficult with SaaS. However, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, EMC, and others entering the market, SaaS ECM may get some legs. For now, SpringCM will continue to differentiate itself through departmental and industry vertical solutions.
SpringCM just released version 4.5 with some new features, notably in the process mangement and security areas. To get a feel for their product you can sign up for a live demo or watch a number of their canned screencast demos available on their website.
Overheard:
Website: www.springcm.com
Management: Dan Carmel, CEO
Funding: $20M (latest: $10M, April 2008)
Investors: North Bridge Venture Partners, Foundation Capital
Driven by FRCP, Guidance Software, a leading supplier of forensics software, joins a growing number of companies that are offering legal hold notification systems. Guidance Software announced EnCase Legal Hold on October 15 with product availability in December. It will be able to “issue litigation holds, interview custodians, monitor compliance with the holds and track the progress of collection and processing of potentially relevant ESI.” The software requires the installation of EnCase; however, customers that do not want this software will not be charged for it.
Guidance Software is a top ranked E-Discovery company in the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Survey (excerpt below); however, this survey comes with a heavy disclaimer. Additionally, a competitor, AccessData, is now run by many ex-Guidance staff.
Although there is much speculation that the E-Discovery market may survive the current economic downturn, this announcement has had little effect on the Guidance stock (chart courtesy of Yahoo!):
Recommind announced their InSite Legal Hold product on October 20, 2008, which is designed create indexes for search on identified ESI before it is collected. This way culling can happen before the data is collected, reducing the amount of data to be processed. Andrew Conry-Murray provides some useful information to use along with the product page and press release.
There are several interesting features with this product. First, the data is crawled and the search index is created for initial analysis without the need to first collect the ESI. The ESI is collected and placed on hold only after the initial assessment. Secondly, individual messages can be extracted from container files, e.g. individual email messages can be extracted from PST files. While many e-mail archive vendors are working with organizations to eliminate PST files, this product can search and collect individual files within PSTs.
Notably, this product does not appear to handle Legal Hold Notification Management as offered by exterro, Autonomy, and now Guidance Software.
There are some open questions:
The product looks interesting for reducing collection costs, but it is also behind in certain areas. Other products in this space can perform remote forensics to locate deleted files and institute legal hold on disconnected laptops (presumably when the user does not have administrator privleges). I’m interested to hear how comprehensive the Early Case Assessment and structured data capabilities are.
16 Oct
Posted by John Wang as Autonomy / ZANTAZ
Archiving101.com reports that Autonomy has closed its Ottawa office and release their employees, responsible for development of the Autonomy / ZANTAZ EAS (Enterprise Archive Services) product line. This is the latest in staffing changes since Autonomy acquired ZANTAZ for $375M in 2007. The Ottawa office was the headquarters for EDUCOM TS, makers of EAS, which ZANTAZ acquired in 2004.
There have been a number of recently reported customer complaints with regards to EAS support with some customers recommending getting support from resellers instead of Autonomy. With the closure of the EAS office, this may accelerate. Notably, Gartner mentions the following in the 2007 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology:
03 Oct
Posted by John Wang as AXS-One
Former high flier, AXS-One (OTC BB: AXSO), announced 3rd quarter results with new license revenues representing $1.3-$1.5 million for the third quarter. We’re still waiting for their revenues and net income numbers so we can compare them with past performance. Over the past year, AXS-One has reduced their losses relative to income. Revenues and net income for the last year are as follows:
Discussion on AXS-One is available at InvestorVillage. Recent posts there and on Yahoo! Finance have not been positive and some are looking for AXS-One to file for bankruptcy.
Notably, they announced their first contract for their Dynamic Data Migrator product which they announced back in June of this year.
IBM has announced their eDiscovery Manager product, an enhancement of the eMail Search for CommonStore product to provide eDiscovery e-mail collection and preservation capabilities on top of their Content Manager and FileNet ECM products. Content Manager and FileNet customers that already use those solutions for e-mail archiving will want to consider eDiscovery Manager. Organizations that have third-party e-mail archiving solutions may find the E-Discovery offerings for those solutions much more attractive as the data does not have to be moved to IBM eDiscovery Manager, an intermediate step, before exporting to review tools.
The ECM integration makes sense since IBM has the base integration capabilities through IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Content Edition, a product from the 2004 Venetica acquisition. Some have highlighted the issue that while IBM’s product can handle third-party ECM products, it cannot natively handle third-party e-mail archive products. This is especially important as many organizations have moved long term archival of e-mail to e-mail archiving solutions, and not their production mail servers. Customers with third-party e-mail archiving solutions will likely wish to use the eDiscovery search, culling, and legal hold features that come in those products instead of moving large amounts of e-mail to an intermediate IBM archiving solution. Notably, Oracle Universal Records Management (URM), a product from the $440M 2006 Stellent acquisition, claims to handle Symantec Enterprise Vault in addition to SharePoint, Documentum, OpenText, etc. The ECM integration space for E-Discovery will likely see more activity as CMIS takes hold and ECM solutions start providing a common interface.
Spokespersons for IBM eDiscovery Manager include:
Kazeon has announced the ability for their Information Server 3.1 Information Access and Management platform to perform identification, preservation, collection of data stored on VMware virtual machine instances and images. This is a very interesting feature as more people are starting to store data on VMs. General Counsels should take note when Sudhakar Muddu, Kazeon CEO, says “We saw end users actually hiding information from their corporations by using virtual images.”
From reading the press release and some articles, the capabilities appear to be:
Overall this sounds like a very interesting feature and there is definitely a need to identify, preserve, and collect data on VMs. I look forward to learning more about it.
Website: kazeon.com
Pricing: Kazeon Information server starting from $4.30/GB (Source)
Management: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO
Funding: $44M (Latest: $21M, August 2006)
Investors: Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Focus Ventures
02 Sep
Posted by John Wang as Clearwell
Clearwell Systems announced the availability of Transparent Search with Clearwell E-Discovery Platform 4.0 in the wake of Victor Stanley, O’Keefe, and Equity Analytics. The primary object of Transparent Search is to show how advanced searches like wildcard and proximity searches match documents in terms of the actual terms being matched. This is done by exhaustively listing all the terms that match the advanced search query with hit counts for each one. Users can then selectively filter the results based on the identified terms based on sampling results to adjust the inclusiveness of the search. Multiple searches can be performed at once to save time and tags can be quickly to the filtered search results.
Clearwell has posted an informative Flash demo which can be reached from their homepage which is worth watching. PlanetEIM has taken some screenshots and put together short overview.
In discussing this new feature, Kamal Shah, Clearwell vice president of marketing, gave an interesting quote to Dave Raffo of SearchStorage.com indicating web search needs to scale but the same requirement may not be necessary for enterprise search or e-discovery. He says,
Saying one approach can be applied by all is like saying the same person can win the 100 meters and marathon in the Olympics. They have different objectives and business drivers. For enterprise search, it’s speed and simplicity. For the Web, it’s speed, simplicity and scalability. For e-discovery, it’s defensibility – can you defend best practices and show it in court and minimize nonrelevant results because of cost per results?
With enterprises facing many terabytes of ESI and billions of records, scalability requirements for enterprise search and e-discovery are becoming increasingly important. For e-discovery, this requirement is primarily upstream from Clearwell where other solutions will be used to perform an initial cull to make the number of records more manageable.
Overall, the features bundled with Transparent Search look very compelling and are just part of the many capabilities Clearwell offers. Organizations facing high stakes E-Discovery should consider the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform for their needs.
Website: clearwellsystems.com
Pricing: E-Discovery Platform is $65,000 per 100 GB plus maintenance and support
Management: Aaref A. Hilaly, President & CEO
Funding: $29+M (C: $17M, August, 2007; B: $12M, April, 2006; A, January, 2006?)
Investors: DAG Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital
Recommind announced immediate availability of version 3.0 of their Axcelerate™ eDiscovery product on August 25, 2008. Axcelerate was first launched in August 2007. New features include:
1) Multi-lingual support
The ability to support multiple languages is becoming more important for E-Discovery and Axcelerate eDiscovery addresses this with:
For automated language detection, it would be useful to have some information on how Recommind handles multi-lingual documents. Additionally, it would be useful to know what kind of word segmentation techniques they are using for character-based, compounding, and agglutinative languages. This is useful in establishing defensibility of the search as some techniques such as morphological analysis may lead to false negatives which would be problemaitc for eDiscovery.
2) Filtering Improvements
Filters can be automatically populated, providing suggestions of what to use. Selecting documents across filters can also be performed. To save time, type ahead technology, which has been showing up in many products, including Google’s homepage, is also included.
3) Native file viewing
Hundreds of file types are mentioned but the feature is not described. Certainly hundreds of text-based file types can be viewed in a text editor, but does viewing other file types require the original application, e.g. does viewing a MS Word doc require MS Word or other third-party application.
4) Processing improvements
Processing improvements include the ability to filter, cull and de-duplication within Axcelerate.
5) Indexing performance improvements
Faster indexing performance is mentioned without specifics.
Spokespersons and journalists:
The follow people have provided quotes and/or covered Axcelerate 3.0:
Management: Robert Tennant, CEO
Funding: $7.5M (Latest: $7.5M, October 2008)
Investors: Kennet Partners
