Autonomy Corporation plc announced the industry's first pan-enterprise search platform for legal eDiscovery and information access, simultaneously meeting an organization's litigation and knowledge management requirements. Autonomy's proven algorithms search across all sources of electronically stored information including text, data, voice and video, finding relevant information for litigation with auditable and repeatable results, and applying a litigation hold function to preserve data from normally scheduled or ad hoc deletion.

    The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments render all relevant ESI discoverable, regardless of format or location, with non-compliance penalties that could run into the millions. This has drastically changed the way information officers, knowledge officers, and corporate librarians manage and store their ESI, and how they must use pan-enterprise search to collaborate with corporate counsels.

    "Today, enterprise search and eDiscovery are viewed by CIOs and General Counsel as completely separate markets with different vendors," said Dr. Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. "However, the fundamental problems of dealing with huge amounts of unstructured information pose a challenge to both parties and as a result, we expect that it will drive a convergence of these markets over the next few years. Autonomy is in a unique position being at the forefront of this market convergence."

    Based on the preponderance of one pattern over another in a piece of unstructured information, Autonomy enables computers to understand that there is a particular probability that a document in question is about a specific subject. In this way, Autonomy is able to extract a document's digital essence, encode the unique "signature" of the key concepts, then enable a host of operations to be performed on that text, automatically. These operations include automatic clustering of related documents, automatic information delivery, hyper-linking of content as well as more traditional short query, or keyword searching. These shortcuts include 'jump out' which misses respondent documents as it stops looking across an index for potentially relevant information once it estimates a document is unlikely to make the top of section of the results list, and partial indexing which only indexes a subset of a document.

Key Features:
    - Provide a vendor neutral approach by searching across highly distributed systems, running on multiple operating systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows NT
    - Produce auditable results
    - Search all categories of information repositories in an organization by supporting more than a 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories
    - Pass results to a hold function to ensure relevant ESI is preserved and not altered in any way or deleted
    - Avoid "jump out" techniques or indexing that compromises important metadata
    - Seamlessly support an end-to-end eDiscovery suite including investigation and early case assessment, legal hold, real-time policy management, data archiving, EDD, on-line review, and production management
    - Provide a meaning-based conceptual search method as an preferred approach over federated search
    - Deliver a fault-tolerant architecture using load balancing and mirroring, with high scalability and security, and a sub-second performance on billions of files