Symantec has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Clearwell Systems, a recognized leader in the eDiscovery market. The acquisition of Clearwell will bring together the industry’s leading eDiscovery, archiving and backup offerings to provide customers one of the most comprehensive information management solutions available.
“As information continues to grow at unprecedented rates, the biggest challenge for customers is to protect, manage and backup this information as well as have the ability to categorize and discover it efficiently,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. “The acquisition of Clearwell’s market leading electronic discovery solution will further increase Symantec’s ability to get the right information, to the right people, at the right time, while reducing overall legal review costs and limiting risk.”
Clearwell's eDiscovery solution complements and enhances Symantec’s Enterprise Vault eDiscovery capabilities to create a more complete end-to-end eDiscovery solution. The existing integration of Enterprise Vault with the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform positions Symantec to quickly help IT and legal users streamline and reduce the cost, time and risk of eDiscovery across the most relevant information sources including email, desktops, file servers, backups and the cloud.
“Archiving and eDiscovery are two critical elements of information governance,” said Aaref Hilaly, president and chief executive officer, Clearwell Systems. “By joining forces and combining the industry’s leading archiving solution with the industry’s leading eDiscovery solution, we will be uniquely positioned to deliver a seamless, integrated information governance workflow, benefitting both Symantec and Clearwell customers.”
Organisations are being required to adopt more formal information governance processes to help reduce the costs and risks associated with legal discovery. According to Gartner, through 2012, companies without an information governance strategy and technology for content archiving solutions, will spend a third more on eDiscovery than those with content archiving solutions. Together Symantec and Clearwell are positioned to offer customers the ability to both proactively and reactively manage and discover their information with increased speed, efficiency and scale, both on-premise and in the cloud, while at the same time helping customers reduce costs and risks.