Storage Vendors Court Law Professionals For eDiscovery Technology

In the spotlight at the New York event is eDiscovery, the use of electronic tools to search for data for litigation purposes.

At the show, Symantec is unveiling Symantec Enterprise Vault 7.0, a new version of its content archival solution, as well as a new module for eDiscovery.

Art Gilliland, senior director of product marketing at Symantec, said Enterprise Vault 7.0 brings flexible automation in the archiving of data such as e-mail and instant messages based on the actual content of the data. The archiving can be done automatically based on predefined rules; manually via a pop-up that forces users to choose from preconfigured categories where the content will be archived; or via an interface to an enterprise content management application such as EMC Documentum or OpenText.

"Customers can set policies for classifying the data that helps decide what gets into an archive, and how long to vault it," Gilliland said. "Before, they could write policies based on such things as who the sender and receiver are. Now they can focus on the content. Archives need to be content-aware."

Enterprise Vault 7.0 also leverages new Microsoft applications for archiving data, Gilliland said. For instance, it can use Windows Rights Management Services to search encrypted e-mails for archiving, and it can natively look at instant messages to determine how to capture and archive them without going through Microsoft Exchange Server.

Deployment and management of Enterprise Vault also has been eased by the addition of an "uber-administrator" who centrally controls the creation of policies and can delegate part of that operation to subadministrators, according to Gilliland. "This is great for companies that add archiving as an internal service," he said.

Enterprise Vault 7.0, too, allows policies to be set for different people within an organization, such as the CEO and CIO, and even certain problem users, Gilliland said.

In addition, Symantec introduced a new module for Enterprise Vault 7.0: Discovery Accelerator, which adds archiving functionality specific to eDiscovery, including regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).

Gilliland said Discovery Accelerator includes technology for three components of the legal discovery process: the ability to easily collect archived information for predisclosure meetings, the ability to do a legal hold on archived data relevant to litigation (per Rule 37 of the FRCP(, and the ability to present archived content in its native format and enable both sides of a litigation to access it (per Rule 34 of the FRCP).

Enterprise Vault 7.0 and Discovery Accelerator are available now. Enterprise Vault starts at about $40 per user license per year for 25 users. Version 7.0 represents the first time that Symantec is selling the software on a per-user basis rather than requiring the purchase of bundles of licenses, Gilliland said. Also at LegalTech, Mountain View, Calif.-based Kazeon unveiled its IS1200-ECS appliance, designed to help companies manage unstructured data for compliance with the FRCP. The IS1200-ECS is similar to the IS1200 appliance for managing unstructured data, a product that Kazeon sells through Network Appliance via a year-old OEM agreement, said Tom Thimot, COO of Kazeon.

The original IS1200 looks at unstructured data to determine what is old, duplicate or near-duplicate to enable that data to be cataloged and searched, Thimot said. The ECS version includes software from Denver-based Catalyst Repository Systems to enable those functions to be applied to legal discovery.

"With Catalyst, the IS1200-ECS can search legal files for the relevant information and then take actions like copy, move or delete," Thimot said. "Lawyers discovered they can move golden copies of files to central directories and lock them down for evidence." Golden copies are a single, clean copy of data that can be used as evidence.

Kazeon adopted the Catalyst technology because it enabled the company to add legal discovery to its appliance without a major change. "We said we didn't want to create a new appliance," Thimot said. "We didn't want to replicate what Catalyst already does."

About 90 percent of Kazeon's sales go through indirect channels, including through NetApp's solution providers. Thimot said Kazeon does have some direct solution providers. "But for now, the channel wood is behind the NetApp arrow," he added.

Xiotech said at LegalTech that it's building a strategy to help customers with integrated information risk management. The Eden Prairie, Minn., vendor also is in the market for companies to help further that strategy, including solution providers or legal service providers.

Mike Stolz, corporate vice president of marketing at Xiotech, said his company aims to build expertise in integrated information risk management, including practices in information governance, business continuity, litigation, and regulatory compliance and investigation.

The reason for the strategy is the complementary nature of the business to Xiotech's core storage technology, Stolz said. "This is a rapidly growing market," he said. "I've always viewed this as an expansion of the strong storage market."

To build the integrated information risk management business, Xiotech this year plans to acquire several companies, including firms that provide related products, solutions and services, as well as others that provide channels for marketing them, Stolz said.

"I hesitate to say we'll acquire VARs, because these companies don't look like traditional VARs," he said. "But I say 'channels' because they help us expand our channel into this marketplace."