eDiscovery Services as an "App"

In my last post, I wrote about eDiscovery in its present state and illustrated how it seems almost “medieval” in some ways. The analogy was drawn between medieval age blacksmithing and “modern” legal discovery practices. I explained that like the hot dirty business of blacksmithing; the present process of legal discovery was hard and carried out by skilled individuals each employing a variety of homegrown or point-product software packages.

Despite this present approach, I argued that a standard hosted Ediscovery capability could emerge to leverage all the power and promise of “The Cloud”. This of course means leveraging the seemingly limitless supply of computing power residing in such “Cloud Computing” services.

I took the position that this would be an evolution as the process of steps many consider eDiscovery to include moves toward a finished and smooth application delivered as a package. If eDiscovery can become a finished application suite of services like Salesforce.com is for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) then people should be able to leverage “The Cloud” to obtain it.

In this post I want to make the case that (eventually) we can think of cloud based eDiscovery as having “an App for that”. It might take a while, but when Salesforce.com came out there were those who thought that CRM would always be done on Excel spreadsheets by small companies until they could grow into ones that could afford a large-scale CRM package. Today eDiscovery customers use a combination of in-house “point products” and various types of services to satisfy their needs in this area. Whenever I have spoken to a customer or prospective customer they have ALL expressed an interest in buying “eDiscovery” as a service in an “on-demand” fashion.

Given this desire to have a more “on-demand” and “service-oriented consumption model” for eDiscovery services, it is instructive to view current thinking in this area of Cloud Computing and to extrapolate how it will apply to eDiscovery. The model of obtaining eDiscovery will likely evolve toward “application status” and “near self-service” delivery in a “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) market model; but it will also likely retain a service component.

Evolutionary Process: Supporting Thoughts

I think that we currently have a bifurcated view of “Cloud” today. On the one hand we have the classic definition of cloud services which means flexible capacity and provisioning of computing and storage capacity. One the other hand we have the “application view” that I mention above. The following articles approach this position differently but end up in the same place: the world of applications will evolve to be powered in the cloud because the economics are compelling and because we have no other choice. The efficient delivery of computing services will be necessary from a competitive perspective. One will not be able to compete in the world of eDiscovery (or any other) without being able to leverage the utility computing model. The cloud utilities of computing and storage are necessary but not sufficient components to power the delivery of necessary applications to businesses or all kinds. EDiscovery will be no different; it must evolve to be a readily consumed set of services or applications.

A recent InfoWorld article contains a nice discussion and definition of the types of cloud services. An article by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft talks about the higher-level aspects of cloud computing, what it can do for society and the greater world, and why Microsoft is investing in it. Both of these articles imply that “The Cloud” will evolve to general use in specific ways through applications that attract users.

However, an article from last August in Wired Magazine puts it best. In “The Web is Dead; Long Live the Internet” Chris Anderson and Michael Wolf show how users move toward applications and platforms, not just WWW information. They give compelling examples of how the power of the application delivered in a SaaS utility model is the likely outcome for most application software. This is likely to be the case for even applications as complex as eDiscovery.