E-discovery appliances find crucial documents

Index Engines, Kazeon and Clearwell Systems are separately announcing appliances that customers can use to discovery electronically stored information -- e-mails, Word documents, PDF files and spreadsheets – for litigation faster than they could by a manual process.

Index Engines this week is unveiling its Index Engines Enterprise Discovery Platform, a software-based appliance that lets legal teams and IT administrators search for and retrieve information for e-discovery purposes.

Kazeon is debuting the Information Server IS1200-ECS, an appliance that also lets users index, identify, search and manage online documents and e-mail messages.

Clearwell Systems next week will introduce version 2.0 of its Clearwell Intelligence Platform software-based appliance.

Being able to electronically discover information from e-mails and other electronic documents is quickly becoming a requirement for many businesses involved in litigation, whether it is a discrimination lawsuit, an Internal Revenue Service Audit or a matter of interstate commerce. Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which apply to any company in any dispute in federal courts, require them to be able to produce and recover all electronically stored information residing on user laptops, desktops, servers and networked storage.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the e-discovery market, which in 2006 was worth close to $1.5 billion, will grow to almost $4.9 billion by 2011.

All these vendors claim that their appliances retrieve data faster than manual processes. Kazeon, for example claims that its IS1200-ECS can reduce the time of e-discovery by as much as 90%.

Clearwell Systems makes the same claim in a decidedly more descriptive manner.

“Our appliance allows you to slice and dice the data faster than Jamie Oliver can chop tomatoes,” says Aaref Hilaly, CEO for Clearwell Systems.

Kazeon’s IS1200-ECS supports Word documents and spreadsheets, PDF files and Exchange and Lotus Notes e-mail. Integrated workflow management software lets legal and IT staff to create a ‘golden copy’ or master version of a record, produce an Exchage .pst or .zip file and secure documentary evidence. Kazeon’s IS1200-ECS is less than $100,000.

Index Engines’ new Enterprise eDiscovery Platform indexes data at wire speed from storage area network (SAN) or local area network (LAN) attached data or by reading offline backup or archive tapes. It allows the full reconstruction of documents without requiring full restoration of tape content. Once a search is executed, the retrieved information can be exported to document management systems for further monitoring, review and analysis. The Index Engines eDiscovery Platform starts at $50,000 for a package that supports as many as four-million individual files or e-mails.

Chris Clark, COO for National Data Conversion, a company specializing in backup tape and file restoration in New York City, uses the Index Engine appliance.

“We apply our skills in the reactive discovery world, in compliance and in records management,” Clark says. “If a company gets hit with litigation, we can recover information from backup tape and get the data off of offline media.”