I’m interviewing Giles on the Brandwatch purpose, and, inevitably, progress with the Brandwatch-Crimson Hexagon merger made up a large part of the conversation.

“Have you been able to play with anything yet?” I ask, snooping for any gossip on the latest iterations of the integrated product.

“I have – do you want to see?”

I had no idea there was a working version of the new integrated Brandwatch + Crimson Hexagon product that was anywhere near ready, but there it was.

Instant insights from logging in

As Giles logs into his account, we’re greeted with a new home page that’s displaying insights from a number of queries set up in his account.

“It’s a work in progress, but it’s pulling things out. This has been shared quite a lot today.” Giles points and I’m informed that one of our blog posts had been particularly popular on Twitter that morning – which, embarrassingly, hadn’t been on my radar.

Historic data

“There’s an enormous archive – something like 1.5 trillion public documents in the data archive,” Giles says. “That’s a thousand billions. Building systems that can analyze that data in seconds is a hell of an engineering feat.”

“That’s going to be available to all customers, which is amazing. And it’s working – you can see it already.”

When using the new product, our customers will be able to create a test search with a months’ worth of data appearing almost instantaneously. They’ll also have the option to look at data all the way back to 2010.

So, so much data

Giles brings up the last 700 days of Captain Marvel-related mentions.

“That’s 4,000 videos on one day,” Giles says, pointing to one spike. He’s excited to show me the mix of new data available, with review and video data making up a large chunk of the sources.

The cool thing about the new breadth of data is that our customers won’t need to wait long to get their hands on it. Online review and video data will be arriving in Brandwatch Analytics in May.

Unfamiliar progress

“We’re actually ahead of plan,” Giles tells me. “It’s quite astonishing and it’s not like we’ve stopped building new stuff.”

The progress so far has been palpable throughout the business. From my experience, I’ve now got 500 colleagues and a team that extends across new territories, and can feel a whole lot of momentum behind all our efforts. Seeing our new product in action feels like a huge milestone, and there’s plenty more to come.

I asked Giles how he felt generally about the merger and the technical progress being made.

“I’m excited and optimistic. Some of the innovation we’ve built – there are a couple of projects we’re working on – where I’m genuinely saying ‘oh my god, that’s incredible’. It’s like magic.”

Make sure to check out NYK Chicago to get the latest on the integrated product. You’ll be able to follow along on Twitter by following @Brandwatch.