Business intelligence solutions maker Attivio announced that Europol has selected its Active Intelligence Engine as the offering that will power its data management and analysis operations. Europol is a law enforcement agency that tracks suspicious activity that may be related to terrorism and other international serious crimes, an area where data gathering and analytics take on a particularly important role.

“Europol is a perfect example, with complex, big data and the need for custom functionality across disparate sources. It is the ideal environment to develop a system that provides real-time access to all relevant information. In highly demanding situations where legacy technologies like search are not enough, the exceptionally deep, fully loaded unified information access (UIA) platform we provide via AIE delivers capabilities that exceed customer expectations.”

Security and policy compliance are some of the reasons that the security firm chose Attivio. The main reason, however, is its platform’s ability to process all kinds of data – both structured and unstructured. This is the secret sauce behind it all, as SiliconANGLE’s Jeff Kelly put it, when Attivio was awarded with the patent for this technology.

U.S. Patent No. 8073840 covers users’ access to the two different data categories at the same time, and represents a big milestone considering this is one of the central pillars supporting Attivio’s offerings portfolio. It’s noteworthy that other companies including EMC have also come up with their own hybrid analytics products, a trend to watch for as this field evolves.

The latest and third version of the Intelligence Engine rolled out in early November of last year. Several additions have been made, including a big upgrade to role-based access within the enterprise, as well as expanded SQL support and the ability to integrate with products offered up by other vendors.