The Sleeping Giant Awakes? IBM Announces eDiscovery Manager
by Aaref Hilaly on August 14th, 2008
On August 5, IBM announced eDiscovery Manager, which it says “enables organizations to better control the eDiscovery process by bringing key eDiscovery tasks in house. This helps clients more easily manage electronically stored information; provide earlier insights into collected evidence; and prioritize downstream evidence review, analysis and production.”
Taken at face value, this is potentially very significant. IBM is the world’s second-largest software company and its Lotus Notes/Domino email system is used by approximately one-third of corporate America. So I decided to dig a little deeper to understand exactly what IBM’s new product can do, and which customers it can best serve.
Product Capabilities
The first and most important thing to understand about eDiscovery Manager is that, before you can use it, you must first buy and install IBM’s unstructured data stack. This comes in two forms: you can either deploy IBM Content Manager and IBM Common Store; or, you can choose Filenet P8 and Filenet Email Manager. Either way, the deployment time is months and typically involves an army of consultants.
For data in IBM’s content management solutions, eDiscovery Manager enables users to search and export. There is no review functionality, no tagging, and no analysis. The limitations in functionality stem from eDiscovery Manager not really being a new product; rather it’s a rewrite of an old product (eMS or email search) with a new AJAX-based user interface.
Target Customers
The best customers for eDiscovery Manager are those enterprises which have large amounts of data in Filenet P8 / Email Manager or IBM Content Manager / CommonStore. For those enterprises, it will be a useful tool, which IT departments will use to identify and collect data, just as they use utilities like ExMerge for Microsoft Exchange and Robocopy for file shares. Most companies will then choose to process, review and analyze data from all these different repositories with an e-discovery solution.
To my mind, what’s more significant than the announcement of eDiscovery Manager is the fact that IBM is waking up to the opportunity in e-discovery. There’s no doubting the company’s reach and technical prowess, and it will be interesting to watch what future products (e.g., “IBM eDiscovery Review”?) are in the works.
