It sounds like some of my “tongue-in-cheek” comments gave the wrong impression. Let me be clear:

1. Clearwell’s primary competitor in enterprise accounts is the existing process of outsourcing e-discovery to expensive service providers. Every now and then, we get compared to different products. But it happens so rarely that it would be misleading for me to call any out as being directly competitive.

2. I did not mean to suggest that people “shouldn’t” enter the e-discovery market. To me, the question of what companies should or should not do is irrelevant. Good or bad, it is a fact of life that lots of players jump into large, growing markets. It is also inevitable that most of these players fail — that’s just how life is.

3. As you say, EDRM is a helpful reference point. In days gone by, e-discovery was viewed as a monolithic process; with EDRM, it can be broken down into different steps to show - for example - how collection/preservation technology is complementary (and not competitive) to review/analysis.

There are great themes in your comments from one blog entry to the next.

However, when I asked which companies your product line competes with, you referenced EDRM.

Conversely, when you talk about the eDiscovery market place, you refer to people entering it as if they aren’t allowed or shouldn’t.

There appears to be orthogonality with you positing your company in EDRM, but when another company identifies their place in eDiscovery (EDRM) ,whether it be classification, preservation, processing, etc., they may be referred to as “dressing up” their products (using language from this post).

EDRM created the pillars of market identification which analysts, customers and other companies use as a reference point. Isn’t it fair to welcome them to the game and let the customers, companies, press, and analysts flush out the winners?

Looking forward to seeing your new products and strategy for control (accountability, authority and responsibility) as it relates to data (e.g. eMail).

Thanks

Joshua