Seagate Acquires E-Discovery Vendor MetaLincs

Disk drive maker Seagate Technology announced Dec. 6 that it will acquire 4-year-old, privately held e-discovery software provider MetaLincs. Financial terms were not disclosed.

MetaLincs' software automatically analyzes e-mails, documents and associated metadata, and presents visual analysis of people, conversations, concepts and communication patterns, Seagate Services Group Senior Vice President and General Manager Mark Grace told eWEEK.

Founded in 2003, MetaLincs has about 50 employees. CEO Ramon Nunez will join the Seagate Services senior management team and will lead the Seagate Services Group's E-Discovery business unit, Grace said.

Upon completion of the merger, MetaLincs will become part of the Seagate Services Group, an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of the world's largest disk drive maker, Grace said.

MetaLincs' business intelligence-like software helps enterprise-scale companies respond to litigation and regulatory issues that require them to search large volumes of electronic data for relevant information, Grace said.

"MetaLincs is a fresh technology that is being used by a small but powerful number of customers at this time," Grace said, "including the [U.S] Department of Justice, Merrill Lynch, Union Bank and a few others."

MetaLincs is a company that has flown somewhat "under the radar," Grace said. "Their 'secret sauce' enables the immediate classification of data as it is ingested into a system, through inferences and keywords, so that the data is kept correctly housed all through its lifetime," he said.

MetaLincs competes in the same sector as Attenex, Cataphora and Stratify, which was recently acquired by Iron Mountain.

MetaLincs is the most recent acquisition for the Seagate Services Group. In 2007, Seagate purchased EVault, a provider of online backup and archive solutions for small and midsize enterprises, and in 2005, Seagate purchased Action Front (now Seagate Recovery Services), a provider of data recovery and data migration services.

With the addition of MetaLincs' e-discovery platform, Seagate Services will be able to offer corporations, law firms and litigation service partners an analytics engine along with one-stop sourcing for archive, recovery and collection, and review tools and services inclusive of EVault's Insight E-Discovery services, Grace said.

Seagate's Recovery Services division also offers a data recovery services for consumers and businesses at 1,400 Staples stores in North America, including Hawaii.

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