EMC to acquire legal discovery vendor Kazeon

EMC said it will buy Kazeon Systems, a company that develops products for collecting and analyzing electronic information for legal discovery.

Kazeon sells an appliance used by law firms and corporate legal departments to identify and process electronic data from laptops, desktops, content management systems and e-mail archives as well as software such as Microsoft's Sharepoint and Lotus Domino. The technology complies with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model used by legal entities and IT staff, the companies said.

They did not disclose terms of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of September.

Kazeon's technology will become part of EMC's SourceOne family of products for eDiscovery, archiving and compliance. Users of the product can do early assessments to help determine the merits of a case. They can also use it to classify information and then take action such as deleting documents or migrating them to storage systems.

Legal, regulatory and governance requirements will continue to become more stringent and expensive, so an in-house method for information governance and discovery makes sense for enterprises, EMC said in a statement. By using a tool like the one Kazeon has developed rather than reactively gathering physical media, companies can save money, EMC said.

Once the deal closes, Kazeon will become part of EMC's Content Management and Archiving Division.