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Relativity acquires VerQu
Global legal and compliance technology company Relativity has acquired VerQu, a data management software company to address the ongoing demand for organisations to migrate and capture communication data for record retention and compliance purposes.
Tony Zhang
Relativity said the acquisition and integration of VerQu into Relativity’s SaaS products will transform how organisations handle collaboration and chat data, and massively accelerate the ability to collect, analyse, monitor and review all types of unstructured data seamlessly and securely.
“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 organisations ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Frank Perrone, managing director at VerQu said since 2013, VerQu has worked to create a data management and migration service to provide a best-in-class customer experience that anticipates 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,” he said.
“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 115 million daily average users worldwide using Microsoft Teams and more than 12 million users on Slack – where the daily average messages per user per day increased by 20 per cent in 2020. Relativity analysed that with the nature of work becoming more collaborative across enterprise technology platforms, “this data cannot continue to be analysed 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.” The Relativity Short Message Format will leverage more sources rather than treating the data like an email and users will be able to review, monitor, analyse and produce data types in its native format.
Relativity will also aim to integrate with cloud data sources directly to enable a more secure, efficient and less costly collection process.
Furthermore, it will also leverage direct access to archives like Proofpoint, to easily pull content from a regulated organisation’s system of record proactively or reactively.
“In addition to the technology this acquisition will bring to market, I’m thrilled to welcome the very talented VerQu team to Relativity,” Mr Gamson added.
“With their team joining us, we will not only strengthen our company culture, but strengthen our leadership in data collections of all types."
This builds on recent legal tech acquisitions with global digital and legal business transformation company Morae recently acquiring Sydney-based information management provider Trinogy Systems.
