Relativity Acquires VerQu, a Data Management Software Company

Global News

07
Jan
2021

Editor

Relativity, a global legal and compliance technology company, today announced that it has 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 into Relativity’s SaaS products will transform how organizations handle collaboration and chat data, and massively accelerate the ability to collect, analyze, monitor and review all types of unstructured data seamlessly and securely.  

“It’s imperative that the legal and compliance industries stay ahead of and evolve with the changing nature of work in organizations globally,” said Mike Gamson, CEO at Relativity. “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 in technology that connects directly to native cloud data sources for surveillance and e-discovery workflows, evolving the data paradigm from documents to include conversations.” 

Relativity will welcome VerQu’s team that includes top-level engineers and project managers who have a deep knowledge and understanding of data management and the ever-changing information technology landscape. Founded in 2013, VerQu has successfully served domestic and global organizations ranging from small and medium sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies. 

“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. 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,” said Frank Perrone, Managing Director at VerQu. “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.” 

In 2020 alone, there were 115M daily average users worldwide using Microsoft Teams and 12M+ users on Slack – where the daily average messages per user per day increased by 20% in 2020. 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.   

In conjunction with the Relativity integration, VerQu will still offer 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.  

Once integrated, Relativity’s SaaS platform users will have the ability to: 

• Treat collaboration data like conversations: By leveraging Relativity 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 its 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 addition to the technology this acquisition will bring to market, I’m thrilled to welcome the very talented VerQu team to Relativity,” said Gamson. “With their team joining us, we will not only strengthen our company culture, but strengthen our leadership in data collections of all types.”