Wind/Escalate, More SaaS eDiscovery Providers Hit the Market
As part of an interview request, I did a fast review of SaaS processing, hosting providers suitable for small firms looking for fixed price service. The market does not make this easy for you or for me to make sense of in the eDJ Matrix. The line between software, SaaS and professional services continues to blur as providers create web interfaces to upload/download ESI with hidden 3rd party tools and manual tech time behind the curtain. We originally differentiated between the traditional software and hosted service offerings with the assumption that the hosting providers were using a publicly available technology, example: Catalyst CR by Lighthouse eDiscovery listing indicates that Lighthouse manages/hosts the Catalyst CR platform. There are 115 eDJ Matrix SaaS technology offerings for the Small-Medium Business (SMB), but only 40 Managed Service SaaS offerings for the SMB. Frankly, this is because we only expanded the eDJ Matrix to cover service providers in our last year of analyst work. I started the eDJ Matrix to track and compare technologies many years ago and that is still the most mature data. Updating the Everlaw listing after my briefing last week was easy because they claimed to be free of 3rd party code. My check turned up two relatively new players in the SaaS eDiscovery market, Wind Legal and Escalate. Neither one gives enough hard information on their minimalist websites to confidently categorize them, but at least Wind discloses that they are a custom interface for Relativity.