Simon leads CommVault's Information Access & Management business including Information Risk, eDiscovery, Compliance and Information Search.

Over the last 20 years he has worked for many large multi-national while building deep expertise in a range of topics including business intelligence, data warehousing, application and information management.

Most recently, Simon has gained specific experience in data retention and archiving, working for or with some of the leading companies in this field to gain specialist knowledge in information risk and compliance.

Riding the Wave of the Perfect eDiscovery Storm

Monday, June 13, 2011

You've heard the rumors, seen it in other IT sectors and now it is here. The long-awaited Gartner E-Discovery Software Magic Quadrant (MQ). For those that haven't felt it, the eDiscovery market has been growing steadily over the last few years and as such, was much in need of some direction on vendor selection. Essentially the time was right for an MQ.

Since Gartner announced their intention to produce an MQ vs. the previous Gartner Marketscope, the eDiscovery market itself has sailed into a state of flux with two culprits at the helm. The first is the directional change from SaaS-based eDiscovery models for legal collection, preservation and processing to corporate legal control of an in-house system for improved efficiency. Since the eDiscovery market has grown up on the premise of outsourcing to law firms, this strategy signals a strong corporate realignment on the reduction of costs and risk associated with eDiscovery.

The second is the industry consolidation of hosted or point-specific vendor solutions with little connectivity or thought for efficiency. Symantec's recent announcement to acquire Clearwell is a good example of a company who views eDiscovery as a use case for archiving and brought Clearwell in an attempt to strengthen its archive business. The trouble is they now have two solutions that pretty much operate independently. Another is Iron Mountain which acquired the Mimosa digital archive and discovery solution in 2007 to complement its paper retention business and now, 4 years later due to poor integration, has had to sell this solution and other digital solutions to Autonomy which will of course continue to be sold as separate toolsets. Add to this the myriad of smaller organizations eagerly expanding their execution models through partnerships and all of a sudden, the complexities of moving and preserving information, across geo-boundaries, inside and outside the firewall, and into the cloud converge to create the "perfect storm."

They say all best laid plans go to waste. Who would have thought the market would evolve so rapidly. Gartner appears to agree that companies are struggling to understand or accept the new "rules of the game" in eDiscovery.

So where does CommVault stand in all this? Well, as an archive and data management enabled eDiscovery ISV, we're firmly planted as both a leader in eDiscovery innovation. We have broken the mold of traditional eDiscovery thinking by collapsing the first four stages of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM.net) into one proactive step, presenting us with our greatest opportunity. A good example is how we enable the discovery of cloned ESI from backup and other forms of data management, effectively eDiscovery without the infrastructure pain. Our market position as a leader in Gartner's recent Enterprise Disk-based Backup/Recovery MQ is testament to our innovation and execution in this area.

That said, eDiscovery for us is closely aligned to the needs of Information Governance, and more specifically, information retention and disposition whether driven by the needs of FRCP or the record keeping requirements of regulated and compliant industries. We provide one unified solution, one method of legal access and preservation, one way of managing the long term lifecycle of information.

In short, CommVault Simpana software provides one platform for efficient and economical information retention across the enterprise, bottom up without the constraints of traditional archiving or the compromise of impacting application environments. Add to this our position as a challenger in the latest Gartner Enterprise Information Archiving MQ and we're poised to "out" flank and "out" innovate even the most well-known competitors. Watch the surf, CommVault's catching a big wave!

This Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner report is available upon request from CommVault.

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