As it continues to investigate alleged irregularities in financial reporting at Nuix, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has revealed it is seeking a replacement for its existing deployments of Nuix Workstation and Nuix Discover.

Earlier this year (ASIC) dropped an investigation over allegations of insider trading at Nuix. Driven by its failure to achieve ambitious projected revenue growth, the company’s share price has collapsed by 92 per cent since its $A1.8 billion IPO in 2021.

Co-founder and former CEO Eddie Sheehy is currently in court, demanding $A180 million in damages for options he argues he didn’t receive while CEO in 2016.

There are also three class actions underway, with investors insisting they were misled regarding the growth prospects of the company, which provides the software platforms that regulators, police investigators and tax officials around the world use to run sensitive investigations.

Last month ASIC issued a tender for new Evidence Management and Early Case Assessment (ECA) Software, which are presently hosted on Nuix.

Asked whether there a specific problem statement that is driving this procurement activity, ASIC responded: “This tender is to ensure that ASIC has access to the tools it requires to take it into the future. ASIC requires a platform that can help it efficiently process and manage growing quantities and types of data over the next decade. “

Although it has left the door open to potentially remain with Nuix, for at least one application.

“This could be with the current platform, or a new tenderer,” ASIC stated.

“ASIC currently uses a different platform for Early Case Assessment and Evidence Management (Nuix Workstation and Nuix Discover, respectively). … this tender is to replace either one or both platforms. The question of integration if two different systems are chosen will form part of the evaluation and post-evaluation process.

“Beyond the requirements to support a variety of load file formats, tenderers need not specify how their platform integrates with ASIC’s current platform (Nuix) or any other platform that may be selected.”

ASIC is presently hosting 32TB of Evidence data on Nuix Discover and is adding 5TB of new material each year.

The Early Case Assessment platform hosts 95TB of data and the new data added each year fluctuates wildly depending on the number of search warrants ASIC undertakes and the type of data it seizes during those warrants.

“On average, over the past few years and using our current workflow, we use an on-prem copy of our ECA system to process onto local storage approximately 200TB pa with only a small proportion of that (approximately 10%) extracted out of the on-prem system and moved to our cloud-based ECA system for review. If the workflow was to remain unchanged, we would assume an increase of 20TB pa of new material being hosted in the ECA review platform, with 10TB becoming inactive each year and with each of these factored to increase by 15%pa,” ASIC notes