By Charles Skamser
eDiscovery Times - October 5, 2012
In the most recent consolidation of eDiscovery vendors, Digital Reef (DR), a Boston based Early Case Assessment (ECA) tools vendor that has been trying to find its place in the eDiscovery market over the past 18 months was acquired by TransPerfect Legal Solutions (TLS) on Thursday October 4, 2012. As a result, I predict that new entity TLS and DR have been catapulted into a formidable player in the eDiscovery for Big Data market overnight. There will undoubtedly be some bumps in the road as TLS figures out how to assimilate DR and leverage its industry leading grid based eDiscovery platform. However, with the global footprint and installed base that TLS already enjoys, it is hard to imagine that the combined assets of DR and TLS will not be a force to be reckoned with.
“Digital Reef has been increasingly used by the world’s largest corporations and law firms for multijurisdictional, complex cases. Combining Digital Reef’s unique Big Data processing power with the global footprint of TransPerfect will provide our clients with a new level of service and scalability,” said Ivan O’Sullivan, chief operating officer of Digital Reef. “TransPerfect has more than 80 offices worldwide and an array of global data centers. Our clients will benefit from greater support around the country and around the world.” As part of the merger, Mr. O’Sullivan will continue to lead Digital Reef and will join TransPerfect’s senior management team.
According to TransPerfect Co-CEO Phil Shawe, “We are very excited to welcome the Digital Reef team to the TransPerfect family. TLS clients will benefit from having access to a variety of ECA tools delivered by the Digital Reef platform. Further, Digital Reef’s facility is, to the best of our knowledge, the highest throughput eDiscovery data center in the world, with the capability of processing more than 17 terabytes of data per day. This capability has earned Digital Reef its reputation for being the industry’s fastest, most scalable eDiscovery software solution.”
As the lead analyst on the 2012 Early Case Assessment (ECA) Buyer’s Guide, I reviewed over 60 eDiscovery software vendors in detail and ended up ranking the top 30. And although, I ranked DR in the middle of the pack with a Good rankings, I found it to be among the best technologies at processing large amounts of data and supporting the emerging global requirements for Big Data and therefore have recommended it to many of my global 250 clients that were faced with multi-terabyte projects. And, the feedback that I have gotten has been very positive. Therefore, my concerns with where O’Sullivan and the DR executive team leading DR was never about technology. It was always about their ability to scale-up their sales, marketing and services operations to meet the needs of their global client base. However, with offices in 80 cities across 5 continents, 100′s of on the street sales professionals and an installed based that includes every Am Law 200 and Global 100 law firm, as well as the majority of Fortune 500 corporate legal departments, TLS answers my concerns in spades.
I predict that TLS, with the acquisition of DR’s technology and the DR executive team, will become a formidable player in the eDiscovery market overnight. Next week I will post the details of what I think TLS needs to do to be successful with DR.
Then, the next question, which players are next in the ongoing consolidation of the eDiscovery vendor market?