EMC (NYSE: EMC) is buying startup Kazeon Systems in a play for dominance of the fast-growing e-discovery market.
EMC said the acquisition will give the data storage giant “end-to-end, in-house e-discovery and litigation readiness solutions” as part of its EMC SourceOne family of e-discovery, archiving and compliance offerings. After the deal closes later this quarter, Kazeon will join EMC’s Content Management and Archiving Division.
Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Brian Babineau called the deal a “good move for both companies. EMC is a logical player in the electronic discovery market, as it stores and manages critical information that could become evidence at any time — they just needed the tools to do so. Kazeon was starting to run into larger competitors that have a more recognizable brand… In this economy, customers tend to spend with brands they know.”
Babineau said Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) and Autonomy were formidable competition for Kazeon. He added that the deal is “bad news” for EMC OEM partner StoredIQ.
StoredIQ marketing vice president Ursula Talley said the company maintains “a partner relationship with EMC via the EMC Select Program and will continue to work on opportunities as they arise. EMC has always valued the breadth and depth of the StoredIQ product and its competitive advantages in the marketplace as we meet the compliance, governance and legal discovery requirements of the enterprise.”
StoredIQ was recently awarded the Annual EMC Partner Solution Award for the Best New Partner Offering, Talley said.
EMC said Kazeon’s technology lets organizations “quickly and reliably identify, preserve, collect, process, analyze and review information in accordance with the widely accepted EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) framework.” It can handle Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that resides anywhere in the enterprise environment, including content on laptops, desktops, content management repositories such as EMC Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, e-mail archives and file shares.
The Kazeon offering is available as an appliance and allows for Early Case Assessment (ECA) to determine case merit and legal strategies to help avoid costly legal fees. Kazeon also limits retention and review costs by avoiding over-collection of data, EMC said, and its legal hold management capability “ensures no erroneous deletion of data and its metadata.”
EMC said Kazeon “is unique in its ability to identify and classify information and take appropriate action, such as preservation, deletion or migration of documents into EMC storage for litigation hold, and EMC Documentum for records management.”
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