Autonomy and Zantaz pursue dark matter

Yesterday I wrote about Orchestria, software that provides policy management for messages and Web and file activity to prevent data leakage and ensure corporate governance and compliance with regulatory and corporate standards. I described this class of software as bring more fine-grained controls to unstructured data, the dark matter flowing through enterprises.

Today Autonomy acquired Zantaz for $375 million in cash to bring some order to the dark matter. Automony is known for its enterprise search technology and Zantaz has focused on electronic discovery of unstructured data for compliance and litigation. In combination, the two companies could offer a service competes with Orchestria's, with real-time policy management, analytics and electronic discovery.

Autonomy and Orchestria are joined by other firms trying to provide policy-based management of unstructured data. For example, Websense recently introduced Content Protection Suite V6, which applies policy-based enforcement of data.

See also: Infoworld's report on the acquisition and the e-discovery market.