Relativity’s acquisition of TextIQ is being well covered by eDiscovery and mainstream media. My burning question was how TextIQ’s analytics meshed with Relativity’s Content Analyst (CAAT) acquired in 2016. The Relativity team graciously took a fast call to give me their perspectives on how this will benefit Relativity customers.
First – expansion of analytic breadth and usage cases
CAAT’s core is based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to build linguistic/conceptual clusters. TextIQ brings Natural Language Processing (NLP) to better help understand the contextual impact of sentences and paragraphs with documents. As an example, Relativities current entity analysis is primarily focused on email headers to normalize name variations for better search. TextIQ extracts name mentions from the content to understand the broader social context along with sentiment. This capability could expand Relativity Trace capabilities and usage cases.
Second – two new products for the portfolio
PrivIQ enables automated, unsupervised learning to identify privilege documents, the players and their different roles. This usually requires training rounds and exemplars to feed the machine learning model.
TextIQ for Privacy – Identification of PII and PHI beyond simple regular expressions like ###-##-#### and the ability to link that information to the owner.
Third – adding a sophisticated analytic research and engineering team
Experts in analytics, A.I., and machine learning are hot commodities in today’s market. The core team and their patents will expand Relativity’s ability to innovate.
So what does this mean? I see this as Relativity pushing back on Reveal’s claim to be the analytics category leader following their acquisition of Brainspace. There is a lot of coopertition between these two, so I doubt that Relativity would put it quite that bluntly. Further, TextIQ’s tools and corporate customer base offer Relativity more upstream traction. I keep running into identity issues while supporting massive migrations or legacy data cleanups. I have encountered custodians with literally hundreds of names, SMTP addresses, UserIDs and other identity facets buried in decades old digital landfills. Shoveling that old email and data into user M365 mailboxes or OneDrives just complicates future holds and collection searches. I can see why Relativity spent some of their new Silver Lake investment. Rounds of funding generally come with the expectation of fast growth and revenue. It will be interesting to see how their recent expansion is going and how they defend their de facto market leader position.
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