For the third year in a row, I visited the yearly Infovis conference with a small team of software engineers from the company. This was about a month ago now, and this year it was located in Sacramento, California. Back again we’re now deep into a number of release cycles. As always, the yearly conference for information visualization research provided us with inspiration and new perspectives. It also boosted our confidence in our own technology being ahead of both the competition and in some cases ahead of the latest research being made into some areas of information visualization. Saying that, I particularly have in mind the exciting and challenging area of presentation of streaming abstract data, that is, “live information visualization”.

The conference not only boosted our confidence, but also gave us a number of new ideas that we intend to make use of when we continuously improve our VBI software platform – which is in essence an industry strength commercialization of various information visualization techniques. Sometimes working with innovative software, you feel like you are “the world’s best kept secret” and wonder, just like many of our customers do, why the market penetration for this type of technology hasn’t progressed more. Well, if you take a look at many of the applications coming out of research, they lack testing and design and continuity and support, and are by nature more proof of concepts than examples of wide spread industry strength stable software. Not surprisingly, such artifacts will not be able to “bridge the gap” even if the idea behind the software is great. However, the recent consolidation trend among specialist vendors that commercialize these types of technologies proves that this is now turning from an emerging market into a more mature market.

One of the themes on the conference was just that, “how to develop software that reaches a large audience”. In a mature market, people using your software are not experts or statisticians or computer engineers, they are ordinary people trying to do their jobs and need software to provide humane interfaces to support their work. This is the first time I have seen a clear and strong presence in the infovis conference also from some of the largest companies that produce software that reach large audiences. Dinosaurs of software, such as Microsoft and Google, were represented at the conference, not only with their researchers presenting papers, but also with some product people. In most cases the dinosaurs are years behind, which is not surprising with complex products with long release cycles such as our all time favorite example Excel. Especially for desktop software, there is the “tyranny of the installed base” which comes into play, effectively slowing things down as anyone faced with maintaining multiple versions of the same software simultaneously knows. Not to mention the requirements of keeping backward compatibility and by doing that also often keeping old and bad habits alive. Despite new “software as a service” models and web applications coming into play now in a big way, this long time truth still holds in many ways.

So although change happens slower than you’d expect if you’re a technologist, I am getting the feeling that we have already entered a new phase where databases and their dual – query languages - now are standardized and commodities. Therefore the market is now turning towards new value creating technologies in the stack, such as “visual analysis and monitoring”. Software specifically designed for “visual analysis and monitoring” resides in the topmost layer of the technology stack, the layer closest to the human eyes and brains of the people out there. Data tucked away in non-visual databases is not utilized efficiently in organizations, because query languages are not people-friendly. The market is understanding that data, this extremely important asset in any business, can be utilized a million times better if it can be turned easily into actionable information. But then it needs to become understandable somehow, which is the big challenge. So how can we fill that need? By creating software that supports people-friendly visual ways of working with the data we can tap into the amazing bandwidth of the human visual system and unleash the tremendous parallel processing power of the human mind. It is extremely exciting and challenging to develop software that delivers on this challenge. In our marketing we use the term Visual Business Intelligence when explaining our technology. This is a term used also by Stephen Few, author of the excellent book Information Dashboard Design and the keynote speaker at Infovis 2007. I recommend a visit at his blog Perceptual Edge which very much deals with some of the design aspects surrounding this promising technology.

Today I just learned that Professor Anders Ynnerman, one of the visualization researchers presenting at the conference, and a researcher at NVIS – Norrköping Visualization and Interaction Studio – Sweden’s centre of excellence for visualization research (http://nvis.itn.liu.se/) won the Swedish IT-person of the year price for his work in the visualization area. This is really exciting. Panopticon Software has NVIS as our research partner and collaborate closely with this institution. One student from NVIS is currently doing his master’s thesis as Panopticon Software, specializing within the area of predictive analytics. It is great that such a small country as Sweden has such an edge within the exciting emerging software technologies for visualization. We also congratulate Anders to being elected into the Swedish Research Council.

Markus Skyttner
CTO
Panopticon Software