Like any movement in the U.S. macroeconomy, the current banking implosion and subsequent credit contraction are hurting a lot of enterprises, but it also is uncovering some opportunities for those in the right place at the right time.
As the government takes over banks such as Washington Mutual and investment houses such as Bear Stearns, you can bet plenty of digital research is starting up behind the scenes to find out who made what bad decision and why. They’re also going to be looking for who was cheating, who knew what (and when did they know it), and who ended up with money they weren’t supposed to have.
There is renewed interest in the e-discovery software sector, along with other subsets of the IT market, such as secure and managed file transfers, risk management software, enterprise search, and second-tier disk and tape backup and archiving.
It’s funny what a real-life crisis can do to compel businesses-as well as individual citizens-to think and plan ahead. As a result of this growing national problem, there appears to be an Iron Mountain (pun intended) of work ahead for so many people.
Prosecutions, indictments, lawsuits and civil actions are forthcoming. Lawyers are going to be busier than usual for the next few years on these cases. They will be scouring through disk- and tape-based storage on all levels for documents, e-mails, spreadsheets, Web archives, PowerPoint presentations, IM transcriptions, audio tape and videos to find out the truth.
No desktop, laptop, storage array, tape cartridge, cell phone, BlackBerry, database, Web page or memory stick involved in any of this will be left untouched.
We thought we would break down these categories and examine their busyness prospects.