In Part 1 & Part 2 of our interview with Jack, we learned about his first impressions of the Autonomy products anchored by the IDOL Platform and specifically how the Aungate Investigator & Early Case Assessment (ECA) and Aungate Legal Hold products address common gaps in identification and preservation stages of litigation.
G: The products that you cover focus on the early litigation stages; Identification, Preservation & Collection. These are the stages that corporate legal is clearly responsible for at least overseeing. What is Autonomy’s vision for corporations and how does that differentiate from competing products?
J: Autonomy’s goal is to be the eDiscovery partner of choice for our customers, and our Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) brings a unique end to end technology platform to the corporation that can manage the entire eDiscovery and information/records management lifecycle. Too many people think that point products are actual solutions; the reality is that email archives, search engines or workflow tracking applications are pitched as an e-Discovery solution while only addressing one piece of the puzzle. Autonomy’s vision is to touch the ESI once to enable search, identification, preservation, policy enforcement, and other related actions, including disposition, from this core platform. With the IDOL platform, there is no need to re-index or re-process the ESI, mitigating the risk of spoliation, and there is no need to create even more copies that have to be stored and managed.
One of the major issues that plague the point products, such as email archiving solutions or legal hold notification platforms, is their limited scope of targets and data streams. We see the corporate infrastructure as a whole, not just as an Exchange server or end-user laptops. IDOL is ready for Unified Messaging and all the different data streams that come along with it. Autonomy’s IDOL platform connects to over 400 different environments, including other vendor email archives and laptops, and supports over a 1000 different content formats so that it is able to understand the meaning of those files and make the contents searchable.
G: So let’s talk about search. What does Autonomy’s Meaning Based Computing really mean to discovery and legal teams?
J: The IDOL platform enables Meaning Based Computing and takes overlapping search functionality like keywords, metadata, phonetics and conceptual search to build meaning out of their contextual relationships. To put it simply, IDOL uses these contextual viewpoints to better understand the meaning of the items and to know how the rest of your data is related to it. Additionally, unlike many solutions available today, IDOL is language independent and can currently process more than 130 different languages.
I saw an impressive automatic learning example while visiting a Pharmaceutical client. They used the IDOL platform to distinguish and track documents and communications based on drug names, dosages, and abbreviations within contextual conversations to automatically categorize items relating to different trials and field reports. This allows them to connect email, reports on file shares and voicemail. I am seeing similar usage of our speech analytics product in call centers and trading floors. The constantly evolving slang and vocabulary of brokers on a trade floor quickly render a manual filter system ineffective. IDOL is able to keep up with changes to common verbiage and extract meaning automatically.
G: Since we are wrapping up, go ahead and see if you can give us the key Autonomy difference.
J: It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy’s solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI.