Global eDiscovery market passes $10 billion

The eDiscovery process of extracting data for regulatory or legal purposes is generally seen as a bit of a niche in the IT field.

However, a new study by research specialists IDC forecasts that the market for worldwide eDiscovery services reached $8.2 billion at the end of 2015. This combined with an eDiscovery software market of just over $2 billion means the global eDiscovery market has passed the $10 billion threshold.

"Increased litigation and regulation coupled with expanding use cases for eDiscovery software will continue to drive moderate growth in the worldwide eDiscovery market," says Sean Pike, Program Director in IDC's Security Products group and leader of IDC's eDiscovery and Information Governance research program. "The data solution market, however, is maturing rapidly as buyers search for automation to solve well-defined problems. To meet maturing needs, eDiscovery solution and service providers are already creating robust strategies to use existing search and analytics competencies to compete in the white hot content analytics and cognitive solution markets".

The Americas region is still the largest market for eDiscovery, and is expected to remain so, but there's been a growth in international demand over the past year. Europe and Asia are both seeing an uptick in demand for eDiscovery services. By 2019, IDC expects Europe to make up almost 23 percent of the market and Asia just over seven percent.

There's also been some consolidation in the market with service providers and technology solution companies pairing off. In addition solution providers are buying capabilities as bolt-on functionality for existing products or services, in an effort to gain or hold onto market share. Software and service provider companies see analytics companies as posing the largest threat to existing market opportunity.

The full Worldwide eDiscovery Services Forecast is available from the IDC website.

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