$2500 per GB or $4.30 per GB?

I’m a little late to the party, but I managed to get a few minutes to catch up on the latest comings and going in the eDiscovery world and found this press release announcing the strategic alliance between Attenex and Kazeon. The press release reads more or less like typical marketing fluff until you get to about the middle of the 2nd page where it makes the claim that, “Kazeon delivers industry-leading price/performance for in-house processing of ESI in preparation for reactive and proactive eDiscovery matters as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte.” Immediately I thought that it had to be a type-o (I first thought it was a “read-o” until I reread it a few times). But alas, it was not a type-o — it was an actual claim made by two companies that should definitely know better.

For me, the timing of this read was somewhat ironic as just a couple days prior I had learned that a large project I had been tracking for a few weeks had been awarded to one of eDiscovery "big boys" (as per the norm on this blog I will not name names). My source on this deal told me that the vendor did not budge off their standard rate, which is known to be somewhere between $2000 - $2500 per GB (which includes cull down, extraction, clustering/concept search, and perhaps 3 months hosting). Learning that this particular law firm (and most definitely many more) would still allow one of their client to be charged $2000 - $2500 per GB for these services was equally, if not more baffling to me.

So what's the bigger joke, $2500 per GB or $4.30 per GB???