eDiscovery Leaders Live: George Nedwick & Jordan McQuown of George Jon
George Nedwick, the founder, owner and principal architect of George Jon, and Jordan McQuown, the Chief Technology Officer for George Jon, join George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
George Nedwick is the founder, owner, and principal architect of George Jon (GJ), a pioneering eDiscovery data infrastructure specialist delivering stable, scalable, fault tolerant, and fully managed data environments. Under George’s leadership, George Jon has grown from an IT startup to an internationally acclaimed industry leader, with 50+ employees serving high-demand clients around the globe from their headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.
Jordan McQuown is George Jon’s Chief Technology Officer, responsible for constructing and evergreening GJ’s technology (application and infrastructure) portfolio. Over the course of his sixteen-year career in the IT consulting and eDiscovery industries, he has established himself as an authority in information technology, cyber security, electronic discovery, and digital forensics.
Shortly after we started our discussion, we lost our connection with George Nedwick, who will join us at a later date to pick up where he left off. We continued with Jordan and had a great discussion.
George and I talked briefly about how George Jon (GJ) got into this space, then Jordan addressed special infrastructure and systems challenges that providers and enterprise IT groups face and how GJ helps them address those problems. We looked at the level of service JG provides as well as how the company has been adapting to deliver ever more effective deployment, infrastructure, and platform support. We discussed setting expectations and the shift in the market from a commodity-based approach to a desire for customized solutions. From there we turned to hybrid solutions and GJ’s “Kit as a Service”, upcoming challenges, cybersecurity, and where GJ is focusing its time and energy today.
Key Highlights
- [2:46] How George Jon got into this space.
- [4:23] Special eDiscovery challenges that providers and enterprise IT groups face and that George Jon helps them address.
- [5:54] Meeting demands for instant action with 15-minute SLA 24x7 and similar responses.
- [7:20] Adapting to deliver deployment, infrastructure, and platform support.
- [9:48] The types of organizations George Jon supports.
- [11:12] Right-sizing and right-setting expectations.
- [12:45] Clients’ transition from buying eDiscovery commodities to seeking customized solutions and implementation in the cloud.
- [16:20] Supporting and enhancing a hybrid work environment: George Jon’s “Kit as a Service” offering.
- [22:51] Upcoming challenges for the industry.
- [25:01] What’s coming on the cybersecurity front.
- [27:59] Where they are focusing their time and energy today.
Key Quotes by George & Jordan
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- “The challenge a lot of providers in this space face is really around the complexity of the data types – the distinct data units, the size of data, the collection. Ultimately it comes down to there is a very large amount of extracted information, a very large amount of data that is stored and stored for seemingly ever, and ultimately that’s far different than what a lot of enterprise IT groups work with.”
- “We continued to hone our skills because those skillsets weren’t native to what would traditionally be an enterprise infrastructure team or an enterprise application support team. We can’t miss out on the deadlines, the time sensitivity, and everything that makes eDiscovery such an interesting and wonderful world of high-priority, no downtime, and tight deadlines.”
- “We pretty much touch about every type of business that has litigation in it.”
- “We’ve really started seeing a journey to the cloud for a lot of our customers, whether it be a SaaS platform such as what you all at Reveal offer…, the appetite to continue to run data centers is definitely continuing to wane across the industry.”
- “From our perspective, the new wave of new technologies, new software, new enhancements – it’s all going to be about the enrichment… How do you make the experience better? How do you make the data better?”