EMC announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Kazeon Systems, Inc.– a leading eDiscovery software provider for corporations, legal service providers, government entities and law firms.

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 organizations to quickly and reliably identify, preserve, collect, process, analyze 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 and  ApplicationXtender), Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, email archives and file shares.

The Kazeon offering is available as an appliance, enabling organizations to quickly deploy the solution. This enables Early Case Assessment (ECA) to determine case merit and legal strategies, possibly avoiding costly legal fees. Kazeon’s targeted collection capabilities ensure avoidance of the classic problem of over-collection which often leads to high retention and review costs. In addition, Kazeon’s legal hold management capability ensures no erroneous deletion of data and its metadata. Further, the Kazeon solution is capable of performing fine-grained analytics, including concept-based search and analysis, and offering a collaborative review platform for distributed reviewers.

Kazeon enables organizations 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 is unique in its 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.

The acquisition will further strengthen the power of EMC’s SourceOne portfolio. EMC SourceOne is an integrated family of products and solutions for eDiscovery, archiving and compliance. Unlike other offerings, SourceOne offers solutions that solve particular customer challenges today, and — in conjunction with the Data Loss Prevention capabilities offered by RSA, EMC’s security division — EMC can now offer customers an industry-leading set of capabilities for discovering, classifying and managing information, enabling a full information governance strategy for the future. Each of the SourceOne offerings stands alone, but also integrates in a modular way with each other to provide a comprehensive solution. SourceOne leverages EMC tiered storage and archive infrastructures.