EMC To Acquire Kazeon Systems

EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Kazeon Systems, an eDiscovery software provider for corporations, legal service providers, government entities and law firms. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2009, subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact to revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

With Kazeon, EMC will be able to offer end-to-end, in-house eDiscovery and litigation readiness solutions as part of the EMC SourceOne family for integrated but modular eDiscovery, archiving and compliance. Kazeon allows organisations to identify, preserve, collect, process, analyse and review information in accordance with the widely accepted EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) framework. 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), Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, e-mail archives and file shares.

The Kazeon offering is available as an appliance, enabling organisations to quickly deploy the solution. Kazeon enables organisations to take a proactive approach to eDiscovery. The same solution that enables end-to-end, in-house eDiscovery can also be leveraged for the policy management of information that resides in multiple disparate systems across the enterprise. Kazeon offers the ability to identify and classify information and take appropriate action, such as preservation, deletion or migration of documents into EMC storage for litigation hold, and EMC Documentum for records management.

“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,” said Andrew Cohen, vice president and General Manager of EMC’s eDiscovery Business. “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. Organisations can save significant money by intelligently indexing and finding just the relevant information, and then collecting it in forensically sound and secure ways, all in-house. Kazeon, as part of the EMC SourceOne suite will solve customer challenges across the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).”

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