The API integration allows Index Engines' appliance to run policies that automatically identify and extract files and email from the Data Domain backup appliance for regulatory and legal discovery purposes.

Jim McGann, vice president of Information Discovery for Index Engines, said that not only does his company's technology help sort data for e-discovery purposes, but it can also be used to reduce archive requirements.

"Right now companies are backing up for disaster recovery and then ... taking those images and putting it on tape for the long term. You don't need all that data. Only about 5% of it is really relevant data," he said. "You can filter out the relevant data in the backup."

Index Engine's technology had already worked with backup products from Symantec, CA and CommVault.

The Collection Engine appliance sits in the Data Domain backup box and automatically indexes backup images, identifying the useful content, collecting what is relevant and writing it back to allocated disk space on the Data Domain , making it available for compliance and litigation purposes.