EMC announced today that they had acquired Kazeon Systems, a standard-bearer in the world of information search and e-discovery. Kazeon had long worked to develop an automatic data classification capability, building an appliance based on open-source and in-house tools. The company’s solution was capable of both scanning file content and indexing it in a database for later search, somewhat unique in the space. Kazeon has also been active in the e-discovery and litigation-readiness space and was top-of-mind for analysts discussing such tools. EMC will likely integrate the Kazeon technology with their SourceOne archiving and discovery platform.
In the past, end users privately voiced frustration with Kazeon’s toolkit. They complained that it failed to scale to ingest enterprise-class jobs and that the complex solution was prone to failure, prompting time-consuming re-scans. The e-discovery space is a complex one, with companies duking it out with regard to the proper orientation: Should records management, data archiving, data search, storage management, or legal lead the e-discovery charge? Kazeon came from the technical data search and storage management space, a good match for EMC.
Kazeon raised over $60 million in their 6 years of existence. They faced a difficult market and were reportedly only able to bring in $7 in revenue in the last 12 months. EMC reportedly paid $75 million for the company, a fair price given Kazeon’s challenges.
I need to learn more about Kazeon but I will tell you that the entire space imo is very poorly understood by our industry. Perhaps that's why Kazeon hasn't succeeded or perhaps the firm's technology doesn't meet the requirement…I don't know.
But in my view, the idea of auto-classifying data at the point of creation or use is extremely compelling. I don't believe today's systems that manage unstructured or semi-structured data can scale (for a business) without auto-classification. My understanding is that various technologies including probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI) and support vector machines (SVM) are showing real potential. I don't know if Kazeon uses these or similarly promising technical approaches.
Many people look to users to provide classification which I believe won't work in today's litigious world. Users do a lousy job of classifying data. As well, many users we talk to in Wikibon are afraid of auto-classification because they fear it will over-ride their internal categories. So that's something that has to be resolved.
But the bottom line is that shoving everything into a central archive and retaining it forever is a dead end. Users have spent billions on this strategy, many knowing it wouldn't scale. The major vendors, EMC included, have taken this approach, perhaps because none better exists.
Maybe Kazeon is the start of something more compelling at EMC. I hope so, although it's EmailXtender and previous classification acquisitions leave me skeptical.
I need to learn more about Kazeon but I will tell you that the entire space imo is very poorly understood by our industry. Perhaps that's why Kazeon hasn't succeeded or perhaps the firm's technology doesn't meet the requirement…I don't know.
But in my view, the idea of auto-classifying data at the point of creation or use is extremely compelling. I don't believe today's systems that manage unstructured or semi-structured data can scale (for a business) without auto-classification. My understanding is that various technologies including probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI) and support vector machines (SVM) are showing real potential. I don't know if Kazeon uses these or similarly promising technical approaches.
Many people look to users to provide classification which I believe won't work in today's litigious world. Users do a lousy job of classifying data. As well, many users we talk to in Wikibon are afraid of auto-classification because they fear it will over-ride their internal categories. So that's something that has to be resolved.
But the bottom line is that shoving everything into a central archive and retaining it forever is a dead end. Users have spent billions on this strategy, many knowing it wouldn't scale. The major vendors, EMC included, have taken this approach, perhaps because none better exists.
Maybe Kazeon is the start of something more compelling at EMC. I hope so, although it's EmailXtender and previous classification acquisitions leave me skeptical.