With more and more enterprises finding themselves under intense scrutiny due to regulatory compliance mandates and litigation pressures, e-mail and document discovery is fast becoming a labor-intensive proposition laced with inconsistency and a small margin of error.
The rising cost of outsourced specialized services to satisfy e-discovery demands is leading many customers to search for affordable automated in-house capabilities they can manage and run themselves, analysts say.
"One of the largest challenges facing organizations having to deal with electronic discovery is the sheer volume of data," said George Socha, president of Socha.
"What [MetaLincs] is offering is a set of analytic tools to help companies more quickly home in on, visualize and prioritize volumes of information that matters most.
MetaLincs' E-Discovery analysis software features indexing, processing, search, review, reporting and production functions.
PointerIBM releases an open-source search and text analysis technology.
People Analysis enables users to display a network of the most important people involved with the subject matter in question and the communication patterns for any topic.
This can reveal any unexpected parties that have access to sensitive information and help guide investigators or auditors toward any relevant conversations.
"[The E-Discovery software] is about seeing the big picture," Williams said.
"It analyzes the results of who is the most important person receiving and creating content on that topic in the company.
"You can see who they're talking to and exactly what they're saying---it's architected for analysis to give you much easier access to important information without having to do intensive view processes."
By contrast, the application's Thread Analysis functionality identifies complete sets of threads associated with any topic and organizes them into groups of as many as five related threads, or side conversations.