Robert Ambrogi Blog
Just six days into 2021, the year has already brought two major mergers and acquisitions, with the merger of Fastcase and Casemaker and Litera’s acquisition of Foundation Software Group.
Now there is another notable acquisition, as Relativity, the global e-discovery and compliance technology company, has acquired VerQu, a data management software company that helps organizations migrate and capture communications data for record retention and compliance purposes.
Of VerQu’s three core products, two are particularly suited to Relativity’s business. One, Hydra, is a tool that provides connectors that allow customers to integrate and connect all of their disparate communication and collaboration channels, including email, chat, enterprise social, financial messaging, files and custom content.
The second, Phoenix, is a data migration tool that allows customers to move their data easily from a source to a destination. It can be used both on premises and in the cloud.
VerQu’s third core product, used by many law firms, is Hive for NetDocuments. It offers an array of tools for NetDocuments users, including for security, search, remediation, administration and analytics.
Leverage VerQu’s Technology
In a conversation yesterday with Chris Brown, chief product officer at Relativity, and Frank Perrone, managing director at VerQu, they said that plans call for the integration of VerQu into Relativity’s SaaS products, especially its SaaS e-discovery platform RelativityOne.
At the same time, VerQu will continue to offer its three products and customers will continue to be able to access those products and related customer services.
Relativity’s Brown emphasized the importance for enterprises in discovery and compliance matters to be able to review not just documents, but all communications data.
Towards that end, Relativity in 2019 introduced its Relativity Short Message Format (RSMF), which makes it easy for a reviewer to view messages from communication channels such as Slack, Skype and mobile SMS.
Brown said integration of VerQu will be able to leverage this technology, enabling users to review and analyze more types of data in their native formats, retaining the richness of the data and better enabling the use of artificial intelligence.
VerQu’s integration will also facilitate cloud-to-cloud data integration, as well as direct access to archives such as Proofpoint.
Perrone said that an additional advantage to customers of the acquisition is that it helps them avoid the problem of “vendor sprawl.” “Now, everything can be done under one solution. Security is consistent. Formatting is consistent.”
Brown and Perrone said that all of VerQu’s 32 employees will move to Relativity. Perrone will take the title of vice president of VerQu.
Founded in 2013, the New Jersey company was privately owned and had taken no outside investment money.
“Since 2013, VerQu has worked to create a data management and migration service to provide a best-in-class customer experience that anticipates our clients’ future needs,” Perrone said. “Joining Relativity is a natural next step to evolve how our products ingest data and combine that with a platform that enables users to analyze and act on that data natively. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can all do in e-discovery and surveillance when we integrate the power of our teams and technologies.”