Yesterday, EMC announced the acquisition of e-discovery vendor Kazeon. In our Fundamentals of E-Discovery course, we break down the popular EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) into four pieces:

1. Information Management
2. Gather: Identification, Preservation, and Collection
3. Filter: Processing, Review, and Analysis
4. Present: Production and Presentation

Certainly, EMC's bread and better has long been piece #1: "Information Management" in terms of storage, document management, and records management. In April, EMC made an attempt at addressing pieces 2-4 through its announcement of SourceOne. Unfortunately, the SourceOne portfolio was a disjointed collection of re-branded EMC products, stand-alone point solutions, and partner-owned solutions.

SourceOne is comprised of:

• SourceOne E-mail Management: the rebranded version of EMC EmailXtender that provides e-mail archiving and management capabilities (but lacking in e-discovery capabilities - like legal holds on e-mails - as we note in the E-mail Archiving and Management Report)
• Discovery Manager: fills some e-discovery holes of the SourceOne E-mail Management by providing the ability to apply legal holds on e-mails
• Discovery Collector: service from EMC partner (and Kazeon competitor) StoredIQ, that specializes in the "Gather" piece of the EDRM.

The SourceOne mish-mash could not adequately meet many enterprises' needs of an end-to-end e-discovery solution.

As students of our E-Discovery course know, while many products that bill themselves as "e-discovery solutions," very few, if any, satisfy the entire EDRM spectrum. In reality each e-discovery product is stronger in one area and weaker in another. For buyers, the trick is finding the product that best satisfies their unique e-discovery needs. For some enterprises, cobbling together a best of breed Gather-specialist, Filter-specialist, and Present-specialist makes sense, but many enterprises need a comprehensive end-to-end solution.

EMC undoubtedly recognized this desire and purchased Kazeon which offers functionality across the Gather, Filter, and Present pieces of the EDRM spectrum. This certainly allows EMC to check more e-discovery boxes, but buyers should be aware that Kazeon's strength is clearly in the early "Gather" stage of the EDRM where it can index content across multiple repositories. Beyond the Identification stage its capabilities tend to be weaker compared to other solutions.

EMC says that Kazeon will now become part of SourceOne. Combined with EMC's Information Management capabilities, this marriage has the potential to deliver a fairly comprehensive solution to many enterprises.

For customers, though, the forthcoming challenge to integrate their Information Management capabilities with Kazeon should not be underestimated. For example, how will an enterprise integrate Kazeon across their Documentum and e-mail repositories? Kazeon's ability to be deployed as an appliance is surely one of the reasons EMC decided to buy. Any enterprise integration poses challenges, but with the security and legal issues that come with e-discovery, the issues here tend to be greater and more serious.

The inclusion of the acquisition within the "Content Management and Archiving Division" of EMC is a good sign. Hopefully, for buyers, this time around integration and a total end-to-end solution will become a high-priority.