As you may have heard, today Relativity announced that we’ve acquired VerQu, a data management software company that helps organizations migrate and capture communication data for record retention and compliance purposes. The integration of VerQu’s products into RelativityOne and Relativity Trace will transform how our customers handle collaboration data. As chief product officer, I am so excited to further our SaaS platform’s capabilities to accelerate the ability to collect, analyze, monitor, review, and produce all types of unstructured data seamlessly and securely. Plus, we just gained 32 incredible new team members and I can’t wait to work with them.
Where Relativity’s Collections & Integrations are Today
Over the last few years, we have innovated in the area of collections and integrations to deliver on improving how organizations handle and analyze their collaboration and chat data. In 2018, we launched the Relativity Short Message Format to empower our ecosystem to handle emerging data sources in the best way, end to end, eliminating the loss of valuable context and metadata to make better, more defensible decisions. Additionally, our customers can now connect directly to Microsoft Office 365, Slack, and soon Google Workspace, while leveraging integrations with technology partners like X1 and Cellebrite to collect unstructured data from computers, mobile devices, and the cloud into the platform.
Where We’re Going
Now, we are taking the next step in transforming how e-discovery and compliance teams handle chat and collaboration data. As I’m sure you know, short message data is only going to increase within organizations, especially as many of us will continue to work remotely for months to come—or perhaps permanently.
To put this growth into perspective, in 2020 alone, there were 115 million daily average users worldwide using Microsoft Teams and 12+ million users on Slack—where the daily average messages per user per day increased by 20 percent over the course of the year. With the nature of work becoming more collaborative across enterprise technology platforms, this data cannot continue to be analyzed like email as teams can lose valuable context and metadata unique to those platforms. While email continues to play a critical role in our day-to-day work, sending messages on Teams and Slack or joining Zoom meetings is accelerating substantially.
Once VerQu is officially integrated, Relativity’s SaaS platform users will have the ability to:
- Treat collaboration data like conversations: By leveraging Relativity’s short message format for more sources rather than treating the data like an email, users will be able to review, monitor, analyze, and produce data types in their native format. Users will no longer lose the richness of communication and collaboration data, enabling better use of artificial intelligence to get results more quickly and reduce false positives.
- Integrate with cloud data sources directly: Cloud-to-cloud integration enables a more secure, efficient, and less costly collection process. More than 30 cloud data sources for RelativityOne Collect and Relativity Trace will be available for seamless ingestion into the platform, with accelerated innovation times for emerging data sources.
- Directly access archives: Direct access to archives like Proofpoint enables Relativity to easily pull content from a regulated organization’s system of record proactively or reactively. Instead of a multi-step process that requires search, export, migrate, process, and upload, Relativity can immediately ingest content stored in the archive to RelativityOne for e-discovery or surveillance.
In conjunction with the Relativity integration, VerQu will invest in and grow its current products—Phoenix, Hydra, and Hive—and customers will continue to access the products and customer service that they rely on while also having the opportunity to leverage Relativity’s resources.
So, What’s the Big Picture and What Does this Really Mean?
Legal and compliance industries need to stay ahead of the curve and evolve with the changing nature of work in organizations globally. It’s clear that enterprise communications will continue to shift rapidly and scale from traditional channels like email toward chat and collaboration platforms. That’s why Relativity is committed to investing and building technology that connects directly to native cloud data sources for surveillance and e-discovery workflows, evolving the data paradigm from documents to conversations.
The world has shifted to collaboration, chat, and short message: if you aren’t capturing the full conversation, you’re missing the story.
