Looking to offer a complete and integrated eDiscovery, archiving, and compliance solution to the litigation masses, information infrastructure solutions company EMC Corporation signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Kazeon Systems, an eDiscovery vendor.

According to information provided by EMC, the deal will help bolster the vendor’s EMC SourceOne product line — solutions for eDiscovery, archiving, and compliance — by offering Kazeon’s in-house eDiscovery and litigation readiness solution modules, which are available as an appliance.

“With the addition of Kazeon to the EMC SourceOne family, we will be able to offer our customers tremendous functionality, saving them money, reducing risk, avoiding unnecessary legal fines, and enabling them to deploy a true information governance and eDiscovery strategy,” said Andrew Cohen, vice president and general manager of EMC’s eDiscovery business, in a statement.

Upon completion of the acquisition, which is expected to happen in Q3 2009, Kazeon will become a part of EMC’s content management and archiving division. Financial terms were not officially disclosed, but according to a blog post by Aaref Hilaly, president and chief executive officer of Clearwell, a fellow eDiscovery vendor, sources with knowledge of the transaction disclosed to him the price is approximately $75 million. “It’s well within the usual range of $50 [to] $100 million that most acquirers pay for technology that has not yet matured into a business,” he wrote.

While it obviously isn’t clear yet how this acquisition will turn out for all the parties involved, in a prior conversation with Brian Hill, a senior analyst at Forrester Research who covers the eDiscovery space, told me that it is an interesting time for this highly fragmented technology market that is looking to bring more of the disparate pieces together. “Most enterprises are reporting they have a large number of different applications,” he said. “We get briefings from a lot of different e-discovery vendors, and some continue to claim they have an end-to-end or comprehensive eDiscovery solution … but there is no vendor out there with a truly comprehensive solution. Instead, you see vendors typically focus on a subset of the eDiscovery process.”

Furthermore, Hill said that we could expect to see larger information management vendors — he specifically noted EMC as one — potentially partner or buy companies with more specific eDiscovery capabilities in order to come closer to an all-inclusive solution. This pending acquisition seems to be one of those types of moves Hill forecasted.

Did this deal come as a surprise to you? Do you think we’ll see more merger-and-acquisition moves of this nature in the eDiscovery market?