New Solutions Make Enterprise Data Digital, Searchable, Findable

There’s a lot of talk about big data these days, but what about the information that companies already have in – gasp – paper form? Bringing this kind of data into the big data mix for storage and search purposes in what analyst Steve Wexler of IT-TNA in a recent article refers to as the legacy data problem. But one man’s problem is another man’s opportunity to make money on a solution.

In the same piece, Wexler mentions that a company called Data Conversion Laboratory offers a solution that digitizes, converts and reorganizes content into searchable XML that can be stored, searched and accessed via content management and other systems.

Other companies including Coextant Systems also offer automation technology to get data into the desired format, structures and languages. Other offering solutions in this vein include HP/Autonomy (News - Alert), Hyland Software, Lexmark/Perceptive Software, Oracle, and ZyLAB.

Image via Shutterstock

Indeed, the area of Enterprise Content Management is a growing field, which grew 7.2 percent last year to $4.7 billion.

A related area is called e-discovery. This has to do with enabling organizations to locate internal documents, primarily for legal purposes.

Andrew Sieja, CEO of e-discovery outfit kCura, which offer the Relativity solution, says its offering is in use by 95 of the largest 100 U.S. law firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, corporations with high litigation portfolios, and various consulting firms that offer litigation support services. In all, the solution has more than 75,000 active users worldwide.

Litigation is a messy business and takes a lot of people and time, notes Sieja. But now we have technology that can amplify one attorney to make the decisions for which 20 would have been required in the past, he says. It’s called predictive coding, which involves making correlations between data in sources like e-mail, he says.