Seagate Technology, the No. 1 player in the cutthroat hard-disk drive business, said today that it will beef up its services division by acquiring MetaLincs, a company that makes "e-discovery" software that helps corporations, attorneys and prosecutors sift through e-mails and other records more efficiently.
Seagate will pay an undisclosed amount for MetaLincs, whose software sorts through mountains of e-mails, documents and other data to produce a visual analysis of what people were talking about and other patterns. The software is designed to zero in on e-mails and documents relevant to a particular case, shaving legal fees, for example, that can run hundreds of dollars per hour. The hard-disk maker hopes to close the deal this month.