Panopticon Enterprise .Net to be launched at SIA New York

Stockholm, Sweden, June 20, 2005 – Panopticon, the leading supplier of real-time visualisation tools to the world's financial markets, today announced the launch of Panopticon Enterprise .Net, a distributed web solution based on Microsoft .Net technology, and the latest addition to the product line.

In Panopticon's latest product, emphasis has been put on ease-of-use while shifting control of the options and settings from the administrator to the user, giving the user full access and control. "You actually get a treemap application that is using live data installed and up and running in 15 minutes," says Markus Skyttner, CTO of Panopticon. "This is our most exciting product so far".

Panopticon Enterprise .Net is a client server solution based on Microsoft's .Net technology that directly addresses financial institutions' visualisation needs. Financial institutions spend up to 50 percent of their IT budgets on integration; Panopticon's .Net reduces those costs dramatically. It enables companies to use visualisation as a navigation hub, connecting different systems and acts as a catalyst for a new generation of business applications that directly address today's most pressing needs. Panopticon Enterprise .Net delivers an easy to deploy solution that is reliable, scalable, maximizes business agility and minimizes maintenance and total cost of ownership. It fully integrates visualisation with existing systems and data feeds, facilitating analysis and decision-making and supporting access across various platforms.

Panopticon Enterprise .Net can be used to create any number of configurable applications which publish treemaps using Internet technologies. A powerful treemap server connects to all available data sources, such as data feeds, spreadsheets and databases and serves an unlimited number of users.

On the server side Panopticon is the first vendor to offer a backend that is no longer limited to a Java environment since it runs in Microsoft's .Net environment making it more flexible and faster to deploy.

On the client side Panopticon now offers a thin as well as a rich client in addition to the Java version available in earlier versions. A thin client can run in any browser, and does not require any third party plug-ins or any client side requirements. With a rich client you need a browser capable of running Java or .Net applications. The rich client offers solutions with real-time treemaps capable of richly interactive features such as continuous smooth zoom, animations and other highly useful user interface features.

For the administrator it is now possible to make updates in a web interface. This enables remote administration since updates can be done from any office location.

Using Panopticon Enterprise .Net, customers can quickly and easily create treemap applications based on complex business-critical information from multiple data sources.

Panopticon Enterprise .Net gives the end-user complete control; the tools available enable powerful data analysis in several dimensions simultaneously. Values can be aggregated or compared on the fly. Objects satisfying multiple criteria can be identified instantly. Overall, the focus has moved from administrator level configurations to user level selections.

Technical Summary

Panopticon Enterprise gives you a graphical "pivot table" which is designed to visualise information and intuitively analyse data in a form that the brain digests very quickly through pre-attentive processing. This is defined as involuntary processing of visual information in a very short time - as fast as 200 milliseconds. (See below).

Summary of main front-end features:

• Visualise data values as graphical objects using size, colour and placement.
• Choose between three treemap styles; classic, windows or cluster, each suitable for different situations
• Filter simultaneously on colour and size to remove items outside the range of interest
• Hide individual items or groups of items that are not relevant to your analysis
• Compare values of multiple selected items
• Search in free text in the entire dataset
• Export data to Excel
• Export treemap images
• Drill down functions
• Trigger actions to launch external applications or navigate to other views

Summary of main administration and publication features:

• Quick deployment, normally in less than 15 minutes
• Administration and configuration through self explanatory web interface allowing remote access
• Code snippet generators for embedding treemaps in web pages
• Functional demos for all front-end client options included
  

Treemaps - brain and mind

Preattentive processing is the innate, natural skill put to use with treemaps. When first looking at a treemap you will be able to point out important values - the big squares and the intensely coloured ones - in a matter of seconds. However, what most people are unaware of is that your brain processes the information before your mind becomes aware of it. For the brain, it is not a question of seconds, but milliseconds. Scientists call this preattentive processing.

Preattentive processing has been found to be valid for a limited set of visual features in images, including size and colour. It is defined as involuntary processing of visual information without focused attention in a very short time - as fast as 200 milliseconds. This automated and effortless perception of information is what visualisation tools such as treemaps make use of. Naturally, it only works for graphic objects. Letters and numbers will always require a conscious and intellectually demanding process in order to be transferred from ink on a paper (or dots on the screen) to something that makes sense to us. Words don't come easy, and a picture says more than a thousand words.

About Panopticon

Panopticon offers Visual Business Intelligence software for financial institutions, telecommunications firms and other organizations that must make decisions based on very large datasets and real-time streaming data feeds. The company offers a variety of enterprise and desktop products as well as a comprehensive SDK that allows clients to integrate Panopticon’s visualization technology with their own systems and workflows. Panopticon and its clients have won several technology awards from Euromoney and The Banker for their implementations of Panopticon technology. Clients include JP Morgan, Fidelity, Reuters, and Citi. The company has offices in New York, London and Stockholm.

All trademarks used herein, whether recognized or not, are the properties of their respective companies.

For more information, contact:

In Europe:
Robert Ekström, CEO, email: robert.ekstrom _at_ panopticon.com, Tel: +46 (0)8 53 480 480
Panopticon Software AB, Brunnsgatan 9, SE-111 87 Stockholm, Sweden

In the US:
Sam Giertz, President, email: sam.giertz _at_ panopticon.com, Tel: +1 212 907 6420
Panopticon Software USA, The Chrysler Center, 405 Lexington, 26th Floor
New York, NY 10174 USA