I have recorded around 50 interviews recently, and only now get the opportunity to go back through them. One advantage of the interviews which I did with Nuix is that Nuix did the filming and editing. Chatting to interesting people is the easy bit of doing these interviews; the production side is more onerous, so I am glad that at least some of the 50 were not produced by us.

These interviews do not generally have a journalistic intent. The aim is to provide something of lasting value rather than instant comment.

The delay allows us to see that Nuix’s acquisition of Ringtail from FTI Consulting was one of the most significant eDiscovery stories of the year. It was announced just before the Nuix User Exchange in California in September and, as I noted in my report of that event, Ringtail was the big discussion point there.

While there, I talked to Nuix CTO Stephen Stewart and asked him about the reaction of customers and others to the Ringtail acquisition.

At the time of our interview, the news was very new indeed and Stephen Stewart had been talking to customers about it. He had first been met by raised eyebrows and that word “interesting” which, in a certain tone of voice, indicates scepticism. This did not surprise him since his own perception of Ringtail, he realised, had been formed many years earlier and had undergone revision as soon as he saw what Ringtail had become.

He had suggested to people that they go away and see a demo and then resume the conversation. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, partly for the Ringtail’s modern look, partly for the array of features, but mainly for the overall user experience. The market expectation was not, Stephen Stewart said, aligned with the reality.

Specifically, those who went to the demos were excited about the analytics, the ease of navigation and the integration with Nuix. Document Mapper, Mines, Continuous Active Learning and the analytics generally had all impressed those who had been to the Demos. The ability to drill down from a high level to a single document and to have tagging instantly reflected in the display had attracted positive comment.

There is a set of pages on the Ringtail website which explain and display Ringtail Visual Document Review.

Nuix and Ringtail have been fully integrated for three or four years, Stephen Stewart said. Usually there is a lull after an acquisition while integration takes place, but the combined power of Nuix and Ringtail is ready to run immediately. What the users saw was “business delivery not geeky features”.

Most of those at the Nuix User Exchange were technical people and there had been little opportunity to get feedback from end users. Stephen Stewart said that he had taken part in a sales call to a customer with Emily Tice (who has joined Nuix with Ringtail). After seeing the ability to drill down into detail whilst also having the large-scale overview of Mines, the customer had been impressed. A voice in the background said “I told you we should looked at Ringtail”.

You can see what it was that impressed the user in this detailed demonstration video webinar involving Stephen Stewart and Emily Tice.

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