Nuix prides itself on its ability to process virtually unlimited quantities of unstructured data really fast. As CEO Eddie Sheehy says in this interview, there is overlap between Nuix’s products and solutions for forensic investigation, eDiscovery and information governance.

One of the features which attracts users – not least regulatory organisations – is the ability to extract what Eddie Sheehy calls “intelligence items” such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers etc and to cross-reference them across a very wide range of data sources.

One of the features of an eDiscovery exercise of this kind is that the investigator does not necessarily know what he or she is looking for. The expression about needles and haystacks is barely adequate to describe the relationship between such intelligence items and the sometimes vast pools of data in which they sit.

Nuix is good at building connections between apparently disparate items. That is interesting enough in the context of an investigation; where it really gets interesting is when that same power is applied to information governance, and specifically the identification of documents and data which have characteristics qualifying them either to be kept or to be disposed of.

Incidentally, if you have not yet seen the new Nuix website, have a look at it, as much for the photographs as for the content. Here is an example, showing Eddie Sheehy exercising his powers over bits and bytes.