Stratify: Discovery System 3.x
September 9, 2008
by Nicholas E. Stover for Beyond Search
Basics
Stratify—formerly Purple Yogi—provides eDiscovery services intended to help attorneys minimize the resources needed to analyze and manage documents. The company is owned by Iron Mountain, a diversified records management company. More specifically, technology provided by Stratify aids in the search, retrieval, and management of information required for a legal matter. Founded in 1999, the company has offices in Mountain View, California, Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India. Stratify can found on the Web at www.stratify.com.
Product
Stratify Discovery System 3.x employs statistical and other methods to identify named people, places, and proper nouns from any collection of documents, including content from network file servers, content management systems, Web sites, and data fields. The indexed information and metadata are categorized into the system’s taxonomy, which can be modified by a licensee. Stratify provides a key word search and retrieval system to allow attorneys and paralegals to locate information processed by the system.
Stratify includes several interesting features; for example, the ability processing documents in multiple languages; inclusion of text mining functions; automatically creating dynamic taxonomies; providing discovery interfaces for reporting and analysis; and function to identify relationships between and among people, locations, organizations and topics.
Customers
The firm’s customers include law firms, corporate legal departments, and US intelligence agencies. Thomson Reuters uses the system. Stratify helps reduce the need for human indexers. Other customers include NASA, the Department of Education, and Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs.
Strengths
The major advantage of Stratify is that the company’s system has been optimized for eDiscovery and manipulation of information generated in legal matters. The company was an early entrant in the text mining sector. The firm’s product now includes visualization tools. The utility of these ways of viewing query results will vary from licensee to licensee. Now included are “heat maps” (to show the user hot spots, neighbor maps (showing topics or entities that have a direct, non-mediated relationship to each other), and network graphs (sometimes called social graphs) to help identify direct and indirect relationships between entities.
Weaknesses
Stratify systems begin in the $100,000 range. This license fee does not include customization or additional engineering services required by the licensee. Over the years, the system benefits from the involvement of a subject matter expert. An organization with little or no experience with enterprise search is not likely to understand or benefit from the software.
Price
Current pricing for the Stratify 3.x system begins at about $100,000. A custom price quote is required.
Summary
The Stratify software search-and-retrieval system lacks some of the case management functions that certain competitors are now bundling with their eDiscovery systems. Performance can be an issue if the system is not properly resourced.
Web site: www.stratify.com
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