Yesterday Google announced a few (mostly pricing) changes to their eDiscovery product. The service is basically an email archive built on top of their Postini (anti-spam/anti-virus) services with some retention settings and a UI for search through the archive. See the quick demo in the original blog post.

What’s interesting is that there is actually little consensus in the industry of what is eDiscovery. If you look at the list of eDiscovery products at MSExchange.org – there are a lot of products and many of them are indeed simply email archiving solutions.

David Sengupta and Paul Robichaux wrote a whitepaper some time ago on how eDiscovery is more than just an archive and search – mostly concentrating on what needs to be done internally when eDiscovery is a concern. These tips seem to apply to hosted solutions as well. Some top eDiscovery products seem to be offering much more than just search UI and be more targeted at auditing people and making sure that the evidence collected with the product stands at court. Will SaaS products get into this niche?

In the blog video, Google is claiming SAS 70 compliance. SAS 70 is basically a version of IT controls-related parts of SOX for service providers. So it is not related to eDiscovery in any way but kind of implies that Postini datacenters have their IT processes relatively well organized.

We are probably yet to see court hearings with evidence produced from a hosted solution – but with more and more companies in that space this is bound to happen. Other online archiving and eDiscovery vendors include: Microsoft/Frontbridge, Fortiva, LiveOffice, MimeCast, Orange Legal, Sonian Networks, and MessageOne – looks like a pretty crowded space for SaaS solutions directly tied to compliance!

Technorati Tags: Archiving, Cloud Computing, eDiscovery, Fortiva, Frontbridge, Google, LiveOffice, MessageOne, Microsoft, MimeCast, Orange Legal, Postini, SaaS, Sonian Networks, Compliance
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