EMC to acquire e-discovery vendor Kazeon

IDG News Service - EMC Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire privately held Kazeon Systems Inc., a provider of electronic discovery software. The deal is estimated to be valued at around $75 million.

"Becoming part of EMC is the right strategic move for us -- giving us the resources of a world-class leader in information management to effectively take our market vision to the next level. We are excited about this acquisition," Sudhakar Muddu, founder and CEO of Kazeon, said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

The Kazeon acquisition gives EMC an end-to-end, in-house e-discovery and litigation readiness application, which will be included as part of the EMC SourceOne products for integrated but modular eDiscovery, archiving and compliance tools.

"With the addition of Kazeon to the EMC SourceOne family, we will be able to offer our customers tremendous functionality, saving them money, reducing risk, avoiding unnecessary legal fines and enabling them to deploy a true information governance and eDiscovery strategy," Andrew Cohen, general manager of EMC's eDiscovery Business, said in a statement.

Kazeon, which sells its eDiscovery tool as an appliance, allows corporations to collect, process and review information in accordance with the widely accepted EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) framework for regulatory compliance and civil litigation purposes.

"Core to Kazeon is its ability to handle electronically stored information (ESI) that resides anywhere in the enterprise environment, including content on laptops, desktops, content management repositories (including, EMC Documentum records management software), Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, e-mail archives and file shares," EMC said.

In addition, Kazeon's legal hold management capability allows organizations to gather data and meta data for a civil case or regulatory inquiry and ensure it won't be deleted by mistake.

"As legal, regulatory, and governance requirements continue to become more stringent and expensive, it is now mandatory for customers to have a solid in-house strategy for information governance and eDiscovery," Cohen said. "It no longer makes sense to collect an over-sized set of content by reactively gathering physical media, such as hard drives and backup tapes."

Upon completion of the acquisition, Kazeon will become a part of EMC's Content Management and Archiving Division.