Index Engines Redefines EDiscovery, Cutting Response Time From Weeks To Days

Index Engines, the leader in next-generation enterprise discovery solutions, today unveiled a milestone in electronic discovery with the Index Engines Enterprise Discovery Platform. Leveraging patented technologies, Index Engines automates information access and retrieval by streamlining online discovery and introducing the industry’s only solution capable of retrieving content directly from backup/archive tapes without the need to first restore the data back to disk. This approach dramatically compresses the electronic discovery process to save hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars in recovery expenses while eliminating the barriers to online/offline enterprise-wide electronic discovery.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the eDiscovery technology market, which in 2006 was worth close to $1.5 billion, will grow to almost $4.9 billion by 2011. The largest direct cost is the collection, processing and review of data, which on average runs about $1,800 per gigabyte. Index Engines addresses this enormous drain on corporate resources by making all corporate data accessible, easily searchable, and available for litigation purposes at a small fraction of this cost.

Current methods of electronic discovery are built around getting the least amount of data required to satisfy legal requirements. Litigators today are afraid to ask for electronically stored information since doing so could put their organization at risk of being asked for an equal amount of actionable data. However, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that went into effect on December 1 require that organizations be prepared to locate and produce information in electronic format— including emails, files, and database data—during legal litigation. To address this challenge, Index Engines delivers fast and easy access to all corporate data irregardless of where it rests, changing the paradigm for eDiscovery.

"End user demand for efficient electronic discovery continues to drive vendor offerings that reduce the amount of time and resources necessary to satisfy litigation requests," said Brian Babineau, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Index Engines eDiscovery Platform compresses the eDiscovery process to reduce the expensive and time consuming restore process associated with backup and archive tape-based information recovery. This will undoubtedly be of value to organizations challenged with identifying content across the enterprise."

As part of this paradigm shift, electronic discovery will no longer be a project-based effort in which companies respond to legal requests case by case, creating a searchable repository, performing the discovery, then deleting the repository only to repeat the operation and expense for the next request. Instead, Index Engines ingests data from all online and offline data stores, creating a permanent repository that can be searched at a moment’s notice. This is done more efficiently than ever before, allowing billions of files to be indexed an order of magnitude faster than previously available and in a very cost-effective manner.

The Index Engines Enterprise Discovery Platform

Index Engines’ Enterprise eDiscovery Platform is an appliance-based offering that collects and prepares data in support of electronic discovery faster and more accurately than any existing solution on the market. Using the company’s patented inline indexing approach, data is indexed at wire speed through connections on a storage area network (SAN) or local area network (LAN) for availability on demand when needed. With this release, Index Engines has added offline indexing to extract content from tape without the need to restore it to disk, creating the industry’s first truly comprehensive eDiscovery platform. This indexing process is clean and accurate —no metadata is modified and there is no spoilage. Powerful information search and management tools ensure that sought after information is found without duplication. This release includes:

• Full content reconstruction of documents without requiring the full restoration of tape content. 
  

• Extraction of metadata – Once a query is executed, metadata and file contents can be exported to today’s most popular document management systems for further review and analysis.
  

• Offline tape document restoration – After query execution, full file content can be restored. IT administrators receive detailed reports with all the information necessary to efficiently restore the specific file.
  

• Dynamic Deduplication – Duplicate files will not be displayed when a query is executed. This ends the need to eliminate duplicate files in order to guarantee that only unique files and email are uncovered.
  

According to National Data Conversion (NDC), a leading compliance, backup tape restoration, data conversion, and electronic discovery firm with over 20 years experience in litigation support and corporate compliance, Index Engines is breaking down the barriers for cost-effective and efficient electronic discovery. “We have chosen to work with Index Engines because no one else can do what they do in terms of searching and finding data without having to restore backup and archived content in proprietary formats. Online or offline, Index Engines finds and produces targeted data faster than any solution we’ve seen on the market, cutting eDiscovery costs by more than 50 percent,” said Chris Clark, Chief Operating Officer at NDC.

“We are changing the rules of electronic discovery for law firms, consultancies, in-house counsel, and organizations faced with this ongoing business challenge,” said Tim Williams, CEO of Index Engines. “Organizations armed with our eDiscovery platform will have significant competitive advantages in terms of speed, cost and accuracy.”

The Index Engines eDiscovery Platform is currently available with prices starting at $50,000 for a package that scales to support a four million file network. For more information on Index Engines’ suite of enterprise indexing products, contact the company at (732) 817-1060.

About Index Engines

Founded in 2003, Index Engines is the leader in next-generation enterprise discovery solutions. The company’s mission is to organize enterprise data assets and make them immediately accessible and easily manageable. Businesses rely on Index Engines’ solutions for comprehensive insight into their data in order to streamline the discovery, classification and management of enterprise assets. The company was started by Tim Williams and Gordon Harris, who prior to Index Engines were responsible for successful startups that include CrosStor and Tacit Networks. CrosStor was a storage operating system company that was sold to EMC (NYSE: EMC) in November of 2000. Tacit Networks, sold to Packeteer in 2006, is the leader in enterprise file sharing for remote office solutions. Index Engines has recruited top talent from both leading storage solution vendors and the enterprise search space.

Index Engines is privately funded and headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey. Its products are sold and serviced worldwide directly and through Index Engines channel partners. For more information on Index Engines, please visit the company’s website at www.indexengines.com.