Legal technology providers take heed: The government is looking for e-discovery solutions in its ongoing efforts to manage and leverage big data . But it’s not willing to settle just for any old e-discovery technology.

For clues on what the government is after, one only need ask the discovery firms that were the winner and runner-up to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) two-monthlong ” Disparate Data Challenge ,” which challenged contestants to analyze, extract and create searches around dozens of disparate data repositories.