Company name: Cognyte
Headquarters: Bohemia, N.Y.
Signature Product: NEXYTE decision intelligence platform
Website: https://www.cognyte.com/
1. Where did your company name originate from?
We are a market leader in investigative analytics software that empowers a variety of government and other organizations with actionable intelligence for a safer world. The name reflects our core mission: We ignite cognitive AI and analytics to generate actionable intelligence, empowering security organizations with insights that help connect the dots and accelerate time-critical investigations.
2. What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
Cognyte is a global security company that creates solutions for investigative intelligence challenges law enforcement faces worldwide. With over 20 years of experience serving this community, we have witnessed the exponential growth of data and the need to extract meaningful insights that drive an investigation to a conclusion.
Because of the vast amount and diversity of the data available today, it has become overwhelming for analysts and investigators to leverage everything available. With that in mind, we began working with advanced machine-learning models to accelerate the investigative process by allowing the computer to augment the analysis of mass amounts of data and surface new leads that empower the investigator to focus on higher-level analysis.
3. What is your signature product and how does it work?
Over the past 30+ years, companies have provided solutions for managing and storing data, conducting visual data exploration and allowing users to ask complex questions about their data. This has led to siloed workflows, roadblocks to collaboration, and the need to move between multiple software applications and facilitate manual correlation to gain intelligence.
In today’s world, threats are ever-evolving and the need to collaborate inter- and cross-agency to gain actionable intelligence efficiently carries high stakes. The NEXYTE decision intelligence platform was developed as a near real-time collaboration tool that fuses, enriches, analyzes and visualizes nearly all data types within a single-pane-of-glass view.
The NEXYTE decision intelligence platform is deployed on the client’s hardware or hosted cloud environment. Working with our clients, we identify available data sources and information to determine important data from an analysis or investigative standpoint. Relevant data is then ingested into the platform, where the users can interact with their information.
NEXYTE automatically links relevant data points related to individuals, groups or objects as part of the entity resolution process, while the enrichment layer uses AI to extract and correlate metadata from structured and unstructured sources. After all the data and entities are arranged, NEXYTE can apply additional analytics to gain automated insights. The solution provides a suite of built-in ML algorithms to discover, prioritize and link potential suspects.
4. Why do you believe your products are essential to the police community?
NEXYTE accelerates the time to decision, allowing law enforcement agencies to efficiently allocate resources where they are needed most. Over the past several years, the profession has been impacted by budget cuts, either through economic downturn or because of the “defund movement.” Agencies nationwide are running at staffing levels well below what is authorized. Yet, the community is demanding the same or higher levels of service. By embracing technology like NEXYTE, agencies can help to cover the gaps in services, using data analytics to better understand where and when to deploy those limited resources.
5. What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
While Cognyte is a global leader in the security market, the business has just started making inroads in North America. From my perspective, North America is the most mature and challenging market in the world. Law enforcement by the nature of their business is risk-averse and organizations tend to shy away from being the first to implement a new solution. That is the biggest challenge to overcome.
6. What makes your company unique?
Cognyte has hundreds of customers in more than 100 countries and 25 years of market leadership, bringing unique proven expertise to our investigative analytics platform and solutions. While feedback from our clients is a key driver for future product enhancements, the company also has a strong practice of employing practitioners from the markets we serve. From former law enforcement officials, former analysts, and former military officials, the company places these talented people in all areas of the company, truly valuing the expertise they bring.
7. What do your customers like best about you and your products?
From a product perspective, customers are blown away when they see the breadth of the data types that can be analyzed within a single platform.
8. What is the most rewarding part of serving the first responder community?
The desire to serve the law enforcement community by providing the best-of-breed technology to support their critical mission is extremely rewarding. When our clients share examples of how they solved a major crime or improved internal processes by adopting our solutions, it creates a feeling of still being able to serve the mission.
8. Do you support any charitable organizations within public safety or the community? Tell us more.
Cognyte is fully committed to giving back to our local and global communities. By connecting our business and corporate social responsibility strategy, we make the world a safer and better place, one program at a time. Whether we’re investing in technology and analytics education for the next generation of curious minds, implementing programs with a focus on diversity, or enhancing the technical skills of physically disabled students, we contribute to our global communities now and build a better future for the long term.
- NextGen Cyber Professionals Program: Cognyte is committed to the development of analytics education and has created a supportive environment to foster the next generation of curious minds in several areas such as cyber security and advanced analytics. Our Magshimim program hosts exceptional students with an aptitude for computer and cyber studies, providing innovative and challenging courses to prepare them for an extraordinary future.
- Cracking the glass ceiling: Cognyte is dedicated to providing a better academic future in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) for young teenage girls. By empowering and inspiring these bright youth, the program aims to promote gender equality by encouraging better future career choices, achievements and impact. Cracking the Glass Ceiling sets out to show these young ladies that they can break all boundaries.
9. What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
Not surprisingly, but the focus is to continue to grow our business in North America and continue to invest in research and development to ensure our solutions help our clients stay ahead of the curve protecting the citizens in their communities.