November 4, 2011 -
WSJ
- Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly relying on information from the Web and electronic records to help solve crimes and evaluate threats, producing a stream of new business for companies that can help them crunch the data.
From big defense contractors to smaller, specialized start-ups, companies are cashing in on healthy demand for software and other technology that can sort through and analyze mountains of government and private-sector data to help track down criminals or look for signs of terrorist activity.
Screenshot of a computer running Verint Systems' video-analytics software, which monitors multiple video feeds for certain shapes, colors, behaviors and other details that might indicate suspicious activity.
Police, for example, might use video-analysis software to spot a suspicious package in a crowded train station and correlate it to the license plates on a nearby car to find a potential suspect.
The government market for analytics software in the U.S. is $1.1 billion a year, said Dan Vesset, vice president of business-analytics research at IDC. He said the market is expected to grow at an annual rate of about 10% over the next five years.
Companies looking to tap that growth are snapping up start-ups in the field. "I think this is one area where there will be accelerated [mergers and acquisitions]" Mr. Vesset said.
In October, International Business Machines Corp. completed the acquisition of data-analytics company i2, which says it helps government agencies address security threats by drawing on "criminal databases, social media and biometrics." Oracle Corp. said last month that it would acquire closely held Endeca Technologies Inc., which provides similar consulting services for business and government. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed.
Interest in the new data tools is increasing, in part because there is so much more information available to law-enforcement authorities, as people use cellphones and social-networking sites to share personal information and more public records are stored electronically.
"It is about discerning meaning and information from millionsbillionsof data points," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a speech earlier this year. "And when it comes to our security, this is one of our nation's most pressing science and engineering challenges."
Much of the information now being used by intelligence agencies and police is in difficult-to-analyze formats, such as video, speech recordings, text and photos from social networks.
Until a few years ago, police and other authorities would look at video of an area "only when there was a disaster," said Elan Moriah, president of video-intelligence solutions at Verint Systems Inc.
"With the increase in criminal and terrorist threats, definitely driven by Sept. 11, video is now viewed as a data source" that needs to be constantly monitored, he said. The volume of such data has mushroomed, he added, as video cameras have cropped up in more public places.
Mr. Moriah said Verint's video analytics can spotlight suspicious activities automatically, as they happen. Its does this by monitoring a video feed for certain shapes, colors, behaviors and other details. He said the system can constantly monitor many video streams, without losing focus, as a human operator might, and thus can do a better job spotting potential threats. "It requires a lot of bandwidth," Mr. Moriah said.
Earlier this year, Verint, which had revenue of about $727 million in the fiscal year ended in January, won a contract to monitor and analyze security-camera footage at the transport hub in New York's new World Trade Center.
Information available on the Internet also is proving ripe for analysis, and people at several start-ups said government agencies are trying to make better use of that data. "The proliferation of social media, which is growing exponentially, is an area that the government has been looking at more and more," said Scott Weber, co-director of the government practice at Opera Solutions LLC, which makes predictions based on data analysis.
Other companies, such as Kapow Software, specialize in finding information on the Internet that couldn't easily be accessed with a traditional search engine like Google. That might include word-processing documents or spreadsheets stored on a server but buried deep on a social-networking site or network.
The intensive monitoring and parsing of all this data raises questions about privacy rights, which advocates say have been trampled in the Internet age. But the companies making the analytics software say they follow relevant laws, and that they also rely on the agencies that use their products to do so.
"Everything we get our hands on is acquired through a legal protocol," said Chris Westphal, the chief executive of data-analysis firm Visual Analytics Inc.
To keep from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, "You have to be smart about extracting the right data," he added.
Large government contractors, meanwhile, also are ramping up their data-analytics units, creating even more demand for programmers and others who can develop this type of software.
"This business is expanding," said Richard Wilhelm, an executive vice president at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. "Our problem is not finding the work. It is finding the qualified analysts."
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About Visual Analytics
Visual Analytics Inc. (VAI) is a leading provider of data analytics, decision support, and information sharing solutions for investigating money laundering, financial crimes, narcotics trafficking, terrorism, border security, embezzlement, and fraud in domestic and international commercial and government markets. The Visual Analytics Data Clarity Suite is the gold standard for unparalleled, enterprise-level analytics for organizations requiring the ability to integrate, access, and analyze any size and type of internal, shared, and/or public data stores. VAI's tools are delivering unprecedented results to the analytical community and satisfying the need for better and faster technologies for data analysis and investigative support around the globe. More information on Visual Analytics can be found at www.visualanalytics.com.
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