IDC Names StoredIQ a Leader in 2011 MarketScape: Worldwide Early Case Assessment Report

StoredIQ’s unique approach to conducting early case assessment on data “in the wild”, has been recognized by analysts at IDC as a market differentiator in their 2011 MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report. The report evaluates the capabilities of early case assessment (ECA) vendor solutions and is designed to help CIOs, corporate legal counsel, compliance officers, and legal service providers understand the key capabilities, the evolving use cases, and market and technology dynamics for the early case assessment solutions and the broader eDiscovery market segment. Among the twelve vendors included in the report, IDC positioned StoredIQ as a leader in the standalone ECA space, a market forecasted by IDC to total $400.8 million in 2011 and reach $857.0 million in 2015.

According to IDC, “Customers cite StoredIQ’s ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source prior to preservation and collection as a key differentiator.” IDC goes on to say that StoredIQ “Boasts highly rated indexing, search, and retrieval performance, and the ability to scale. Customers that are looking to search and analyze the universe of content prior to collection highly rate StoredIQ’s ability to scale, as well as StoredIQ’s search and retrieval performance.”

IDC’s recognition of StoredIQ as a market leader validates our innovative and novel approach to conducting ECA prior to preservation and collection. Our powerful ability to perform early case analysis on data where it natively resides gives legal counsel the ability to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter far earlier in the eDiscovery process. Unique among evaluated vendors, StoredIQ’s approach yields a much stronger ROI as data is identified, understood and culled where it lives in the enterprise rather than after costly collections, culling and processing in a central location.

StoredIQ’s early case assessment offering is part of the company’s DiscoveryIQ application. Product strengths and key differentiators identified by IDC include:

• Ability to directly connect to and search a variety of data sources including: major messaging systems (Exchange, Notes/Domino), distributed endpoints, network file shares, export files, major archival and storage systems (EMCCentera, Hitachi HCAP, IBM FileNet, IBM Information Archive, NetApp Snaplock, Symantec Enterprise Vault), content management systems (EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet), and Microsoft SharePoint (including wikis and blogs in addition to document libraries), and laptops/desktops.
• Ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source, prior to preservation and collection.
• Highly rated indexing, search and retrieval performance, as well as the ability to scale.
• Ability to perform real-time what-if risk/reward assessments utilizing the DiscoveryIQ application. Based on different culling decisions, customers can see a real-time “scoreboard” provide updated estimates of review costs for a given data set or case.
• Streamlined workflow designed to enable IT and the legal users to collaborate throughout the eDiscovery process.

To learn more about StoredIQ’s Early Case Assessment solution:

• Download an excerpt from the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report
• Download StoredIQ AnalyzeAnywhere Technology Brief
• Email info@storediq.com

StoredIQ Enhances Critical Legal Hold Process with Integrated Notification and Preservation

At StoredIQ, we want to change the customer mindset to define legal hold as not just the simple act of notifying custodians to preserve relevant data, but to  see it as a holistic process that includes notification tightly coupled with the analysis, collection, and preservation of responsive data.With our enhanced Legal Hold solution, we’ve unified these traditionally disjointed components, providing a simple yet robust solution for managing the entire duty to preserve process. From notification, to tracking acknowledgement, to analyzing custodial data, and finally collection and preservation – legal and IT users gain complete control and insight into the duty to preserve process with a reliable, repeatable, and auditable solution that seamlessly integrates hold notifications with the collection and preservation of data.

Historically, performing legal holds has been a very manual and labor intensive process. Spanning multiple systems, it was time consuming to administer, almost impossible to track, and relied heavily on custodian self-preservation. StoredIQ’s integrated hold notifications with intelligent data collection, as part of a comprehensive eDiscovery workflow creates a holistic and legally defensible process which eliminates the burden on custodians, improves efficiency, and reduces legal risk.

Vivian Tero, Program Director for GRC Infrastructure, IDC

The importance of an integrated legal hold solution recently came to light in Treppel v. Biovail Corp., 249 F.R.D. 111 (S.D.N.Y. April 2), which states that a standard “litigation hold” memo to company employees is not enough. As soon as litigation becomes a reasonable possibility, a potential litigant must act quickly to identify potential sources of evidence, and act to preserve that evidence.

Though it is important to notify potential custodians of their duty to preserve data, the true value of a legal hold solution is the ability to then take action on custodian data. This is why we’ve seamlessly integrated the legal hold workflow with DiscoveryIQ, StoredIQ’s eDiscovery application. Companies can ensure compliance with case law, initiate hold notifications, track acknowledgements, perform early case assessment across all matter relevant data, and perform single-instance collection to a secure retention platform.

For a complete list of Legal Hold features, download the StoredIQ Legal Hold Technology Brief, visit our Legal Hold site, or email info@storediq.com.

Doubling down on a bluff

Phil Myers, StoredIQ CEO

HP acquisition of Autonomy great for the Information Management market … but a risky ‘all in’ move for the participants

The World Series of Poker 2011 has just wound down in Las Vegas.  Yesterday, HP & Autonomy moved the game to the Bay Area.

There is an age-old wisdom in poker that there is a strategy for betting a bluff.  And it seems like it really applies here in spades to HP & Autonomy.  The saying is this: ‘If you bluff at the pot, you better be willing to follow it up and put all your money at risk’.  I’m reminded of that as I watched the stunning move HP made to acquire Autonomy.  Spending $10.4B of the ~$12.9B they have in cash is truly an ‘all in’ move. 

But, is it a wise one?  Or, a bluff that every other vendor will now call? 

First, the good news.  This is GREAT news for everyone who has spent the past five years pushing the Information Management marketplace, trying to get enterprises to prioritize getting their petabytes of information in order BEFORE they jump into fire fighting in eDiscovery, compliance or any other issue that demanded real-time, relevant information to make decisions. Several thought leaders, most notably Deb Logan at Gartner and George Socha with the EDRM group have been forecasting an organizational shift based on a growing wisdom that the cost, complexity and risk that corporations have is just too high without good information management and governance solutions. 

This acquisition clearly validates the value of this shift and a perspective shift in how this problem needs to be solved.  

HP has now bet their businesses on the approach of ‘proactive information management’ is the winning hand in the Big Data market. 

We believe their intentions and this latest merger will trigger a firestorm in the space that will be healthy for customers, vendors and solution providers.  History tells us so.  In almost any market that developed into a BIG space, there was a point in time where an outbreak that was almost a religious war provided a catalyst.  Think the relational wars between Ingres and Oracle, the systems management wars between Tivoli and CA, the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape, the CRM wars between Siebel and Salesforce.com or even the search wars between Google and Yahoo. This acquisition provides a platform for some major conflict.  

So, what does this all mean to the rest of us?  We think it means we’re at the beginning of a paradigm shift and the best thing we can all do is prepare well for the change. They don’t pay us to be expert analysts (and we’re not) but from our seat, here are the Top 10 things that we believe will happen next: 

Top 10 Things that this Acquisition will Trigger

1. Vendors competing in Information Discovery, Governance or Management will add indexing engines to their products to compete with Autonomy.
2. CIOs will drive a shift to prioritizing Proactive Information Management vs. Reactive eDiscovery solutions.  
3. Scale will be the new IT benchmark … ‘last year’s news’ on data sampling and predictive coding will be replaced by how much data your engine can analyze. 
4. Customers will move towards establishing Information Management standards in terms of people, process and technologies.
5. A new IT Service will emerge around providing real-time ‘information intelligence’.
6. SIs and SPs will begin to build practices around Information Management.  
7. Executives will demand answers to ‘Big Data’ problems from their CIOs. 
8. Boards will require reports on how governance standards are being adhered to. 
9. Mirror-image Cloud-based services will emerge to provide tactical stop-gap solutions for a plethora of Information Management applications. 
10. Some business will create a competitive advantage that moves them from one of the pack to a leader in their industry based on the sophistication of the ability to discover, govern and make decisions faster based on their insight into Big Data. 

Now for the bad news.  And maybe a gratitutous eleventh forecast.  HP will struggle mightily with integrating Autonomy if they can even get shareholder approval for it (does this seem like Compaq déjà vu or what?) before ultimately creating the analogous version of OpenView for Information Management.  Only this time maybe it will be called ‘CloseView’ given the proprietary nature of Autonomy? 

And one last piece of perhaps self-serving forecast.  There were only two vendors in this space who built their business with the philosophy of building an information management platform capable of managing enterprise-scale data volumes in the petabytes of size … Autonomy and StoredIQ.  One took a closed approach and stitched together many acquired pieces to create a beast of a platform that only a vendor like HP could sell.  The other took a lean and mean approach to providing a simple, scalable and open platform that will embrace 100’s to 1000’s of partners to scale it.  It’s a model that every other winner has used before.

Aces in the hole here in Austin?