I have been following with some amount of amazement, the litigation industry buzz around Guidance Software's August 20, 2008 announcement that they are going to begin to offer a pay-per-use pricing option for their EnCase® eDiscovery platform. Don't get me wrong, I think that it is a great idea. However, given the fact that pay-per-use pricing is now a standard pricing options in the rest of software world outside of litigation technology and has already begun to become mainstream in the litigation market as well, I am hard pressed to call it a "game changing" move.
For the past several years, litigation technology vendors with Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) or Citrix based onDemand platforms have been offering a standard pay-for-use pricing model. Examples include Online Review Tool (ORT) technology providers such as Lexbe, ImageDepot™, CaseCentral, CaseLogistix, and many other vendors In addition, many of the new SaaS based email archiving technologies such as Google, Autonomy, MessageOne, LiveOffice and Fortiva base a major portin of their value proposition on the fact that they offer pay-for-use pricing.
SaaS is the future of software delivery across the board and most of the forward looking technology vendors in the litigation services market realized that years ago. Therefore, vendors with legacy technology claiming to be changing the game with a pay-per-user pricing model are actually behind the curve and not leading the pack. The real leaders are the technology vendors that have already embraced the pay-per-use pricing model and are designing and developing true multi-tenant SaaS applications that will dramatically reduce the overall cost of eDiscovery.
The beauty of the the SAS model is that if they product works for you, you keep using it. If it doesnt meet the need, or a better solutions comes along moving to a better fit / solution is very easy. There are a number of offerings now in the eDiscovery / Lit Support space that are in the SAS model, and more being addded every day.
ReplyDeleteHave a look at the new (pay per use) early case assessment and analytics tools from earlyCASE.com. There is a free version and a professional version that is a flat $198 (for all you want to process / analyze.