Land down underCompany in the spotlight: Distillery Software

Founded in 1997, Distillery Software is based in Canberra with offices in Sydney and Wellington, New Zealand, and partners in the United Kingdom, Africa, and Asia. Distillery Software produces software designed to distill knowledge and intelligence from raw information by linking disparate information elements.

9/11 brought to the forefront the need for enhanced intelligence collection, analysis, and presentation. This heightened awareness has led to a search for better tools to achieve these aims, particularly in the software domain. Specific needs include: data management, text analysis, mapping, link analysis, telecommunications search, crime scene analysis, and data analysis. Well-prepared analysts are essential to national security.

Intelligence analysts must not only collect, digest, and be able to present intelligence using software tools, they are also faced with a multitude of questions on how to direct their intelligence collection and analysis efforts. For example:

• Can financial techniques used in analyzing global corporations help to better understand the funding of terrorist groups?
• What can the procedures of crime scene analysis reveal about possible multiple explanations?
 How can this knowledge be applied to the prevention of terrorism?
• How do the detailed understanding of the capabilities and vulnerabilities of military units and armed groups help political leaders to design more effective strategies?
• Will rendering narrative data — from printed reports, computer screens, and newspapers - into graphics provide additional insights?

Such questions arise primarily from experience, but can they also be provoked by software? Is there intelligence software that not only facilitates collection, analysis and presentation but also helps direct analysts in their endeavors?

Distillery Software, the founders of which have worked extensively in intelligence and investigation agencies themselves, believes it has such a solution. Distillery Software believes that well-developed a software product should not only constitute a facilitation tool in the hands of analysts, it should also stimulate their professional curiosity to examine alternative avenues through the appropriate correlation and presentation of information.

One of its flagship products, the Intelligence Hub supports integrated work flow and tasking, providing a 360 degree intelligence-centric view of operations in relation to core intelligence data. Distillery Software defines its goal in this context as “building operational processes out of the core intelligence system, relationships between various elements, investigations and tasks can all be drawn back to core intelligence entities, like persons, organizations, locations, numbers and other references. In addition to the benefits of helping to draw disparate data together and to identify operational overlaps between units, this approach adds significant value