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EMC Signs Resell Agreement With Clearwell

by Aaref Hilaly on February 2nd, 2009

Today, EMC and Clearwell announced a partnership under which EMC will resell Clearwell through its EMC Select program. It is easy to see why the deal makes sense. EMC's storage products (EMC Celerra and EMC Centera) and its content management systems (Documentum, Legato) are deployed at thousands of enterprises and government agencies across the world, so this massively expands Clearwell's distribution and reach. For its part, EMC benefits from being able to sell the most widely deployed e-discovery solution in corporate America which, in the past 6 months, has also received strong endorsements from industry analysts like Gartner and Socha-Gelbmann.

But beyond being great news for EMC and Clearwell, this announcement is significant for two other reasons. First, it demonstrates once again that e-discovery has become an established software category which is adjacent to, but different from, content management. This realization has driven not just this deal, but also several other recent moves such as Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven, IBM's new e-discovery products for IBM CommonStore and FileNet 8, and OpenText's partnership with Recommind. It takes evangelism from large companies like EMC and IBM to educate the market about a new software category, so these deals will accelerate the pace at which enterprises adopt in-house e-discovery solutions.

The second reason why the EMC-Clearwell partnership has broader significance is that EMC's approach is fundamentally different to that of its competitors. Unlike IBM or OpenText, EMC has a dedicated group of e-discovery specialists, led by Andrew Cohen, the Assistant General Counsel, which helps EMC's IT-oriented salesforce work more effectively with corporate legal teams. If, as I expect, this approach of marrying e-discovery domain expertise with great technology salespeople and a leading e-discovery software product is successful, then I would expect other major technology companies to follow suit.

All indications are that e-discovery will be one of the few areas of software spending to grow in 2009. Partnerships like this can only accelerate the trend.