IDC Cites Big Support Market

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- The legal discovery and litigation support infrastructure market will reach $21.8 billion in 2011, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.6%, IDC predicts. This forecast is based on IDC's recently updated legal discovery and litigation support infrastructure taxonomy, which reflects changes in the market's competitive dynamics. Among the notable updates are the inclusion of physical records and storage management services, as well as strong growth in storage infrastructure and security services. IDC also notes the adoption of data extraction and migration services as critical enablers of enterprise records management and information retention programs.

Key trends worth noting include:

• Legal matter and compliance records repositories are the near-term use cases for active archiving architectures.
• Legal discovery is also impacting the broader IT organization beyond its legal technology operations.

"For very large and litigious enterprises, understanding the potential discovery burden of their technology refresh, decommissioning, upgrade, and application migration activities is becoming part of their technology risk assessment and management efforts," said Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC. "Also, organizations increasingly recognize the criticality of consistency between their physical-based and electronic records and storage practices. These developments present opportunities for the global system integrators, physical storage and records services providers, storage software, hardware, and storage infrastructure services, and storage security services vendors, and will drive tighter partner relationships between the niche legal discovery and litigation support services vendors and system infrastructure players."

IDC