Are you surprised that disk drive maker Seagate Technologies acquired e-discovery software developer MetaLINCS last week?
According to the press release, this and prior acquisitions allow Seagate to “offer corporations, law firms, and litigation service partners a technology leading analytics engine along with one stop sourcing for archive, recovery and collection, review tools and services”.
This acquisition continues the active e-discovery deal-making (see my October 2007 list of EDD acquisitions). By now, it should not surprise anyone that a disk drive maker is getting into e-discovery. First, storage system company EMC entered the EDD market almost 2 years ago (see EMC eDiscovery Services and my Feb 2006 blog post E-Discovery Convergence at Hand? ). And second, noted industry analyst Michael Clark of EDDix has long predicted the convergence of e-discovery with enterprise solutions providers: see his comments in my post Oracle and E-Discovery?, Nov 2006.
Those interested in how MetaLINCS as part of Seagate will play out can read Mark Reichenbach‘s blog, On the Mark. Mark is an experienced EDD professional and MetaLINCS VP, Client and Industry Development.
Disclosure: My employer Integreon offers MetaLINCS services as part of its e-discovery and offshore document review services. That said, I blogged about MetaLINCs long before joining Integreon: see Another E-Discovery Tool (Aug 2005) and my listing it as one of my 5 legal tech picks for 2006 in January 2006.