In a move I found somewhat surprising, Symantec bought eDiscovery vendor Clearwell Systems last week for $390 million. What's surprising is that as a security company, Symantec had never really looked at this angle before.

With Clearwell, Symantec wants to branch out into governance and eDiscovery from its Enterprise Vault product. Deepak Mohan, Symantec's senior vice president for the Information Management Group says that this deal provides a way for customers to meet the growing challenge of managing information, especially in a discovery process.

"The acquisition of Clearwell's market leading electronic discovery solution will further increase Symantec's ability to get the right information, to the right people, at the right time, while reducing overall legal review costs and limiting risk," he said.

This purchase clearly fills in a gap in Symantec's functionality. Symantec also appears to be betting that eDiscovery is an IT play by positioning it in this way, but it might find that it's the legal department that wants to make these decisions. And surveys have found that IT and Legal don't always play nicely together in the enterprise. As such, Symantec might have more difficulty incorporating Clearwell into its product line than it might believe.

What's interesting about this acquisition is that it took so long to happen. eDiscovery has been a content management growth area for some time and it would make sense for the larger vendors to begin scooping up the stand-alone eDiscovery vendors. While EMC bought Kazeon in 2009, the pace has been slower than expected. Perhaps this is a signal that eDiscovery vendor shopping season is about to begin.

For more information:
- see the Symantec press release

Related Articles:
Clearwell releases E-Discovery Platform 5.1 
Clearwell adds new Legal Hold module for eDiscovery customers 
Guidance Software reveals update for EnCase eDiscovery platform