eDiscovery Will Follow the Cloud Computing Boom

The National Inflation Association (NIA) reported this week that  after years of rumors about cloud computing going mainstream around the world, the cloud computing boom is now finally here. They predict that by the year 2013, cloud computing could become a bigger boom on Wall Street than the dot-com boom was in the year 2000. Cloud computing is currently a $74 billion industry that accounts for 3% of global IT spending, but in 2013 cloud computing is expected to become a $150 billion market.

The NAI further stated that 2012 will be remembered as the year in which cloud computing started to become widely adopted worldwide. Cloud computing is expected to create 14 million new jobs globally by year 2015. In the consumer space, Gartner is predicting that cloud services will be on 90% of personal consumer devices by year 2015 so that consumers can store, connect, stream, and synchronize content across multiple platforms at different locations.

Industry analyst are heralding the explosion in the Cloud computing market as great news for the Cloud Service Providers (CSP).  According to a forecast from independent technology analyst firm Ovum, the global public cloud services market will more than triple in size over the next five years to reach revenue of $66 billion in 2016 and the market will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.4 percent from the $18 billion it reached at the end of 2011.  Ovum goes on to report that in terms of the cloud computing service lines, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will shrink from 87 percent of the market in 2011 to 62 percent in 2016 due to the rise of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), which will grow from 9 percent and 5 percent, respectively, to 23 percent and 16 percent by the end of the forecast period.

And, there are numerous other studies by most of the major international industry analysts that predict a dramatic increase in the size of just about everything having to do with Cloud computing.

However, it is my impression that the inevitable and potentially dramatic increase in the demand for eDiscovery and Information Governance due to this explosion of the Cloud computing market, is flying under the radar of most analysts.  eDiscovery and Information Governance professionals know full well that there is a linear and possibly an expontial relationship between the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and the demands and cost of identification, collection, analysis, processing and production of that ESI.

In 2011, Gartner predicted that the eDiscovery market would reach $1.5 Billion in revenue by 2013.  And, depending upon which analyst you follow (and believe), the size of the Information Governance market is anywhere from 2X to 10X the size of the eDiscovery market.  I believe that all of these forecasts are extremely low.

Further, a recent study by eDSG on "How Cloud Service Providers Support eDiscovery and Information Governance" as reported on this blog on March 7, 2012, indicated that 95% of  the Cloud Service Providers and 98% of the general counsel from the global 2000 (based on participation in the survey) did not have a plan for responding to eDiscovery and Information Governance requests for ESI residing in CSP facilities.

In summary, my prediction is that the explosion in the size of the Cloud computing market as reported by the National Inflation Association is really good news for any of the technology and service providers, along with their investors, that are planning to support eDiscovery and Information Governance in the Cloud.  As the name of this blog implies, the eDiscovery paradigm shift is underway and the demand of Cloud computing is only going to make that shift and the associated size of the market even bigger.

The full text of the press release by the National Inflation Association: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloud-computing-is-new-wall-street-boom-says-nia-2012-03-20

Labels: Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Service Providers, CSP, Early Case Assessment, eDiscovery, Information Governance, Law, Legal, Legal Technology, Litigation

posted by Charles Skamser @ 8:33 AM