EMC acquires eDiscovery vendor Kazeon

Consolidation in the eDiscovery space continues

Developments of the week in storage

EMC acquired eDiscovery vendor Kazeon last week, ending months of rumors as to who the storage giant would pick up to supplement its SourceOne product family.

Slideshow: Hottest tech mergers of 2009

Rumor is still rampant on how much Kazeon got for turning its soul over to EMC – some reports say $75 million, but others say double that amount.

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EMC acquired eDiscovery vendor Kazeon last week, ending months of rumors as to who the storage giant would pick up to supplement its SourceOne product family.

Slideshow: Hottest tech mergers of 2009

Rumor is still rampant on how much Kazeon got for turning its soul over to EMC – some reports say $75 million, but others say double that amount.

Anyway, it's a lot of money for a company that specializes in a niche market – the indexing and discovery of electronically stored information. Other consolidation of this market has already occurred. FTI Consulting bought Attenex and RingTail, LuciData acquired Juritek, RenewData snapped up Digital Mandate and Seagate acquired MetaLincs.

Kazeon makes an appliance that provides eDiscovery, litigation and analytics software. The company was founded in 2003 by CEO Sudhaker Muddu, CTO Anurag Maunder and software architect Christos Tryfonas. The company will become part of EMC's Content Management and Archiving Division. Kazeon had raised $60 million from Menlo Ventures, JK&B Capital, Clearstone Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

Kazeon competed with StoreIQ, another EMC partner, and Recommind, among others. Kazeon's products support laptops, desktops and servers, as well as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus Domino.

According to EMC, Kazeon had the widest breadth of Electronic Discovery Reference Model enabled products. The acquisition was the second company EMC picked up last week – the first was FastScale Technology, a vendor of management software for data centers.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.