IBM logoIBM 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.

  1. Functionality: this product is focused on the left hand side of the EDRM model
    • Search, culling, legal hold, export, and audit trail capabilities are included
    • Review, analysis, and tagging are not included
  2. Data Source coverage:
    • E-mail ingestion from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, PST files, NSF files
    • ECM integration with Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, and OpenText
    • Integration with email archives via APIs
  3. Required Components: eDiscovery Manager requires one of the following IBM ECM products:
    • IBM DB2® Content Manager and IBM CommonStore
    • IBM FileNet® P8 and IBM FileNet Email Manager

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:

  • Ken Bisconti, vice president, product and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management
    • “The explosion of electronic content presents challenges for organizations to retain and produce information efficiently and accurately when needed,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president, product and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. “Our eDiscovery offerings enable customers to have insight into knowing what information exists, where it is stored, how long it must be kept and how to locate it.” (source)
  • Aaron Brown, program director for IBM’s content discovery segment
    • “Out of the box today, we can’t pull e-mail out of a [third-party] archive.” (source)

Website: www.ibm.com … ediscovery.html

Gartner MarketScope Rating: Caution

Market Cap: $111B