Xerox Acquires Viewpoint for an On-Prem Option

Xerox has acquired Lateral Data for its Viewpoint product and employees, which lets Xerox offer an on-premise eDiscovery option. Previously Xerox Litigation Services (XLS) lacked an in-house component and was exclusively outsourced to law firms, service providers and consultancies, or was offered as Software as a Service (SaaS). XLS does very well in the law firm and large global corporate space with their advanced review tool CategoriX. They also offer additional hosted and SaaS products and services. What they lacked was an in-house platform for corporate eDiscovery, and for law firms who took on corporate on-premise eDiscovery projects.

Viewpoint will allow XLS to offer an in-house eDiscovery platform with collection and legal hold, along with ECA and on-premise review. XLS may be late to the party with ECA, but at least they have a decent spread in data types: Viewpoint collects from social media and collaboration platforms including Google Docs and SharePoint, as well as the usual suspects of servers, in-house and cloud-based email, and end-point computers. Customers may run Viewpoint from their own servers or from a cloud services provider. (Note that cloud-based eDiscovery providers may also offer Viewpoint to their customers.)

The acquisition allows Xerox to address its lack of on-premise components, which is a wildly popular option with corporate clients. Viewpoint and XLS products will not be combined but they will be integrated so customers can mix-and-match eDiscovery given their personal preferences. For example: 1) entirely on-premise or from the cloud to perform collection to simple review with Viewpoint, 2) using Viewpoint for in-house collection and ECA, and XLS for outsourced processing, review and production, or 3) turn over all eDiscovery stages to a service provider or consultancy who uses Viewpoint and XLS. The upshot is a broader and more flexible model that lets Xerox grab a bigger portion of the eDiscovery market. Lateral Data’s Fortune 500 and mid-market customers are particularly attractive to Xerox, who is firmly established in the largest global corporations and law firms but has lacked downstream reach to the increasingly important mid-market customer.