 | |
| Industry | Analytics software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1990 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, U.K. |
| Products |
|
| Parent | ChoicePoint (2005) Silver Lake Partners (2008) IBM (2011) Harris Computer (2022) |
i2 Group is a UK-based software company that produces visual link analysis software for military intelligence, law enforcement, and commercial agencies. Since 2022, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Constellation Software.
Founded in 1990 in Cambridge, i2 Limited sold products to more than 2,000 organizations in 149 countries, including most members of NATO. The company was founded by Mike Hunter and Dr Tim Spiers, who along with one other founding investor and employees of the company, held all shares until the company was acquired in 2005.[ citation needed ]
i2 developed software products for visualisation and analysis of disparate data sources to aid criminal investigation, and which were later also used by other branches of government (including anti-terrorism, military intelligence and defence), as well as commercial fraud.
Beginning with desktop Windows solution, the first products were the i2 Link Notebook and i2 Case Notebook, which would eventually be used by every police force throughout the UK, and were often the incentive for the first PC installed for use by analysts and investigators in a particular office.
Product capability and range was expanded from law enforcement, for use across industries including government, military and national defence and public safety, as well as commercial fraud prevention.
US headquarters (known as i2 Incorporated) was in McLean, Virginia. In 2005 the company was acquired by ChoicePoint. [1]
In June 2008, i2 was acquired from ChoicePoint by Silver Lake Partners Sumeru fund for $185 million. [2]
In July 2009, i2 merged with Knowledge Computing Corporation (KCC), makers of Coplink software. KCC was founded in 1998 in Tucson, Arizona. [3]
In 2011, i2 received $10 million as an out of court settlement from Palantir. [4] i2 sued Palantir in federal court alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement over Palantir's algorithm. [4] Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s director of business development, used a private eye company as the cutout for obtaining i2's code. [4]
In December 2021, IBM announced that it will be divesting the i2 family of products to N. Harris Computer Corporation, a division of Constellation Software. [5]
The first products included the i2 Link Notebook and i2 Case Notebook.
The i2 Link Notebook enabled investigators to create entity relationship diagrams (a kind of visual database) allowing raw intelligence – largely textual reports (e.g. witness statements) – to be entered manually, revealing the relationships within the data and enabling data from different sources to be collated and graded. Automatic and manual layouts, and the ability to create, share, search, analyse and crucially print, even extremely large charts (sometimes tens of metres in length), dramatically improved law enforcement's ability to understand and communicate the status of investigations, and to direct and manage the process.
The i2 Case Notebook provided similar data entry and visualisation of time series data (i.e. laying events out along themes such as people and places), again able to handle very large data sets. Even with variable density timescales, due to the very large number of events uncovered in a large investigation, a single Case Chart could cover several walls in an office, or stretch tens of metres along a corridor.
While initially for manual data entry, these tools were then extended with add-on components to allow integration with databases. These database add-ons allowed mapping between a database entities (such as person, place, organisation, vehicle, asset, event) and the relationships between entities (such as associate, owns, related) and visual entities used to represent those records on the chart (person icon, place icon etc.). The first such database interface was to HOLMES 2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System), and subsequently many different SQL and even free text data sources. With database integration a query could be entered from within the visual representation of the data, the chart, either using a context menu on the chart background, or on a displayed entity (usually an icon). Query results were delivered directly to the visualisation, by adding elements to the chart, and any added entities and links were automatically laid out without disturbing the rest of the chart, for ease of understanding. Investigators could explore a database with an initial search, and then incrementally expand to follow particular lines of thought. For example, by right clicking a person icon, choosing "Expand", and having new entities displayed as icons connected to the queried person, to show relationships drawn directly from the database. Thus revealing associations that would be difficult to spot through a traditional database query UI such as a person record that may or may not include information about known associates, vehicles, assets and so on, related to that person. This removed the need for any contextual knowledge by the investigator to infer likely relationships, and enabled even a new investigator to quickly explore new data or new hypotheses even with very large data sets.
The i2 Analyst's Notebook became the name for a packaged solution which included the i2 Link Notebook and i2 Case Notebook. This was part of the Human Terrain System, a United States Army program which embeds social scientists with combat brigades. An investigation into fraud in the U.S. Army was reported to have used Analyst's Notebook in 2009. [6] Analyst's Notebook was also used in the Army Distributed Common Ground System through 2011. [7]
Other i2 products included: Analyst's Workstation, iBase, iBase Intellishare, iXv Visualizer, iBridge, iXa Search Service, TextChart, ChartReader and PatternTracer. Its products deal with problems sometimes called "big data". [8]
In September 2011, it was announced that IBM acquired i2 Limited. [9] The terms were not disclosed, but estimated at around $500 million. [10] At the time, it was estimated to have 350 employees. [8] The products were then sold under the IBM i2 brand, as part of its "Smarter Cities" campaign. [11] [12]
A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A database management system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relational database systems are equipped with the option of using SQL for querying and updating the database.
Informix is a product family within IBM's Information Management division that is centered on several relational database management system (RDBMS) and multi-model database offerings. The Informix products were originally developed by Informix Corporation, whose Informix Software subsidiary was acquired by IBM in 2001.
An object–relational database (ORD), or object–relational database management system (ORDBMS), is a database management system (DBMS) similar to a relational database, but with an object-oriented database model: objects, classes and inheritance are directly supported in database schemas and in the query language. In addition, just as with pure relational systems, it supports extension of the data model with custom data types and methods.
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versions of the software released since 2015 have the brand name IBM SPSS Statistics.
SAP SE is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg. It develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company is the world's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor.
CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one of the largest independent software corporations in the world, and at one point was the second largest. The company created systems software that ran in IBM mainframe, distributed computing, virtual machine, and cloud computing environments.
Cognos Incorporated was an Ottawa, Ontario-based company making business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) software. Founded in 1969, at its peak Cognos employed almost 3,500 people and served more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries until being acquired by IBM on January 31, 2008. While no longer an independent company, the Cognos name continues to be applied to IBM's line of business intelligence and performance management products.
Unicom System Architect is an enterprise architecture tool that is used by the business and technology departments of corporations and government agencies to model their business operations and the systems, applications, and databases that support them. System Architect is used to build architectures using various frameworks including TOGAF, ArchiMate, DoDAF, MODAF, NAF and standard method notations such as sysML, UML, BPMN, and relational data modeling. System Architect is developed by UNICOM Systems, a division of UNICOM Global, a United States-based company.
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a Canadian-American multinational information conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and maintains its headquarters at 19 Duncan Street there.
IBM Netezza is a subsidiary of American technology company IBM that designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for the most demanding analytic uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.
IBM SPSS Modeler is a data mining and text analytics software application from IBM. It is used to build predictive models and conduct other analytic tasks. It has a visual interface which allows users to leverage statistical and data mining algorithms without programming.
Palantir Technologies Inc. is a public American company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.
In network theory, link analysis is a data-analysis technique used to evaluate relationships between nodes. Relationships may be identified among various types of nodes (100k), including organizations, people and transactions. Link analysis has been used for investigation of criminal activity, computer security analysis, search engine optimization, market research, medical research, and art.
i2 Analyst's Notebook is a software product from i2 Group for data analysis. Based on ELP (entity-link-property) methodology, it reveals relationships between data entities to discover patterns and provide insight into data. It is commonly used by digital analysts at law enforcement, military and other government intelligence agencies, and by fraud departments. It is a part of the Human Terrain System, a United States Army program which embeds social scientists with combat brigades. Several investigations, including an investigation into fraud in the U.S. Army, are reported to have used it. It is also used by Swedish police to analyse social contacts and social networks.
The Distributed Common Ground System(DCGS) is a system which produces military intelligence for multiple branches of the American military.
Informix Corporation was a software company located in Menlo Park, California. It was a developer of relational database software for computers using the Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Macintosh operating systems.
Platfora, Inc. is a big data analytics company based in San Mateo, California. The firm’s software works with the open-source software framework Apache Hadoop to assist with data analysis, data visualization, and sharing.
Embedded analytics enables organisations to integrate analytics capabilities into their own, often software as a service, applications, portals, or websites. This differs from embedded software and web analytics.
Quantifind, Inc. is a technology company that provides software as a service to discover, investigate, and report entity risk as an indicator of potential financial risk, financial crime, and money laundering. The software is used by financial institutions and government agencies.