Monday, February 1, 2010

Vendor News Round-up

Here is the round-up of several of this week’s vendor announcements. These announcements reflect a number of the trends anticipated by Fronterion in the Ten for 2010 trending release in December 2009.

CPA
CPA Global announced a 47% equity management buy-out by the London-based Intermediate Capital Group. The deal was led by DLA Piper and was priced out at $709 million for the near majority stake.

It will be interesting how the buyout will affect the management and direction of CPA Global. Results are yet to be seen. At the very least, it does appear to be a good indicator in regard to the unfreezing of global capital markets.

As predicted in Ten for 2010, Fronterion noted that, “As capital markets improve in 2010, these larger players will access outside capital investment to drive further growth and acquisitions.”

Integreon
A joint announcement revealed Integreon will be one of the vendors involved in an innovative e-discovery initiative by International law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. The offering known as PEARL (Pillsbury’s E-Discovery Alliance of Resource Leaders) is an alliance of undetermined formality to link together an end-to-end e-discovery solution for Pillsbury clients.

In addition to Integreon, other vendors in the alliance include ACT Litigation Services, Discovery Services, Protiviti and TransPerfect Legal Solutions.

This is a major step forward to have an American Global 100 law firm publically announce they are outsourcing significant aspects of their legal services. We can be fairly certain that this will not be the last.

Another interesting component of the alliance is it’s pricing structure. It is one of the first formal offering of an e-discovery solution by a law firm with per gigabyte pricing.

This also reflects trending predicted by Fronterion, “As organizations continue to publicly broadcast their outsourcing initiatives and leverage their outsourcing engagements as a competitive differentiator, vendors who are part of high-profile deals will be in a position to build substantial brand awareness.”

No comments:

Post a Comment