Everyone saw the recent acquisition of Interwoven by Autonomy for a whopping $775M. In this tough economic climate Autonomy has been able to raise capital and gain shareholder approval to make such a hefty acquisition. This can only mean the involved parties are extremely bullish about the combined opportunity for the two companies and that the acquisition will pay off handsomely over time (a short period of time, we might add).

We believe that the eDiscovery market is taking off especially as corporations are  investing in litigation support software in-house. The market has been seeing a shift in the spending – away from Legal Service providers and consultants, and toward in-house software. For obvious reasons, we support this trend; seriously, corporations are going to save substantial amounts of money in this process, and it’s going to make life easy for legal professionals who discover, collect, process, analyze and review data, and for IT professionals who manage the infrastructure and help in the eDiscovery process, especially collection and legal hold.

It’s going to take Autonomy a while though, to deliver an integrated End-to-End eDiscovery solution for in-house deployment. It’s not an easy task to integrate massive applications like Zantaz, Interwoven etc. Let’s watch them unfold over the course of this year.