Iron Mountain Buys e-Discovery Software Provider Stratify

Byte and Switch reported last week that Iron Mountain will shell out $158 million in cash to buy e-discovery vendor Stratify Inc. "Customers have been asking us for this... It's a white-hot market, by all accounts a billion-dollar market... We're seeing estimates between $4 billion and $12 billion in the next few years," said Iron Mountain president and COO Bob Brennan during last week's earnings conference call. Stratify's applications sift and search email, scanned documents, and electronic files for specific items, and they also map out relationships among threads and document groups, which attorneys can review when preparing for litigation. Iron Mountain will probably also attempt to leverage Stratify's Digital Repository to enhance its information retrieval services.