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Extract from article in May 2017 Legal IT Insider Newsletter
kCura’s recent decision to bring the UK launch of its SaaS eDiscovery platform RelativityOne forward to the summer of 2017 is not intended to create a war with its local hosting partners but, according to at least one senior figure in the industry, that is precisely the effect it will have.
The eDiscovery leader announced at its London Relativity Fest at the end of April that RelativityOne will be available in an Azure data centre in the UK in 2018, but it has since expedited that and the cloud solution will be available in a matter of months.
Behind the scenes, kCura has been growing its London team, including in March hiring Duncan Morley from Millnet, which was acquired by Advanced Discovery in January. In the last 12 months, kCura has added six new people to the London team across support, customer success, solutions, and sales.
The move is a natural progression for the Chicago-headquartered company, not least because the UK is its second largest market outside of the US and that London is home to its EMEA office.
However, it will undoubtedly put pressure on the sophisticated network of UK hosting partners that kCura has built up to deliver its until now on premise eDiscovery solution.
To date partners that provide data hosting have had to buy, install and maintain their own infrastructure – charging a premium to companies that need eDiscovery services as a result.
Going forward the hardware and software are all available within RelativityOne, prompting one adviser to say shortly after Relativity Fest: “kCura doesn’t see this as a war with its hosting partners but it is. The small ones exist on hosting but kCura is hosting its own data centres and I expect it will be able to do it more cheaply and pass on those savings.”
Asked if kCura is entering into competition with its partners, vice president of international, Steve Couling said unequivocally: “No, we’re not. e-Discovery is a complex industry, and software and services will always go hand-in-hand.”
He adds: “With RelativityOne, our partners can take better advantage of the expanding e-discovery services market by focusing on their differentiators – their core capabilities and services – rather than Relativity upgrades, or setting up and managing infrastructure. Additionally, we’ll also continue to support the on-premises version of Relativity, and we see having the choice to leverage a hybrid offering of RelativityOne and the on-premises product as a major benefit for end users. We’re actually developing new functionality that facilitates the hybrid approach, such as a unified workspace portal, where end users can log in, see all of their Relativity workspaces, and access any of them, whether they’re on-prem or in the cloud.”
Read the complete article in the May 2017 Legal IT Insider (PDF)
Source: Legal IT Insider