EMC pulls the trigger and buys Kazeon

Last week, I wrote in my Editor's Corner [1], about a rumor that EMC [2] was about to buy Kazeon [3]. EMC announced yesterday that they were indeed buying the eDiscovery vendor and adding it to its Content Management and Archiving Division.

As I mentioned in last week's column, EMC also has a relationship with StoredIQ [4] and Clearwell [5], yet as writer Michael Hickins predicted [6] on BNET, EMC chose Kazeon, probably because it has a more comprehensive solution, or possibly because the price was right. Chris Priemesberger reports in eWeek [7] that EMC will pay $75 million dollars for the company. Clearwell’s CEO Aaref Hilaly blogged [7] about the transaction--he is not impressed--while StoredIQ informed me by email that they will continue their relationship with EMC in spite of the Kazeon purchase.

It appears that EMC particularly liked that Kazeon was available as an appliance, which enables customers to install and deploy it quickly. Andrew Cohen, Vice President and General Manager of EMC’s eDiscovery business says, "With the addition of Kazeon to the EMC SourceOne family, we will be able to offer our customers tremendous functionality, saving them money, reducing risk, avoiding unnecessary legal fines and enabling them to deploy a true information governance and eDiscovery strategy.”

As for Kazeon, it appears it felt EMC would give it a far greater market reach than it could hope to achieve as an independent company. "Becoming part of EMC is the right strategic move for us--giving us the resources of a world-class leader in information management to effectively take our market vision to the next level. We are excited about this acquisition," Sudhakar Muddu, Founder and CEO of Kazeon said.

Whatever the reasons, it appears that Kazeon is the first of the independent eDiscovery vendor dominoes to fall. It will be interesting to see if other ECM vendors follow EMC's lead and buy one of their own.

For more information:
- see the EMC press release [8]

Related Articles:
eDiscovery could be next target for ECM vendors [1]
EMC gets into eDiscovery in a big way with SourceOne [9]
Kazeon eDiscovery available for Lotus Domino
Kazeon provides eDiscovery help for SharePoint users [10]