Type Public Number of employees 200 Headquarters Stockholm, Sweden | Industry Computer software Founded 1999, Stockholm, Sweden Parent organization Datawatch Corporation | |
 | ||
Number of locations 6 (Stockholm, London, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago) Area served North America, Europe, Asia Products Panopticon 6 Enterprise Application with Embed Option, Panopticon Developer SDK for Java, .NET & Microsoft WPF Founders Ludvig Sandman, Willem De Geer, Sam Giertz, Markus Skyttner | ||
Panopticon Software (now known as Datawatch Designer) was a multi-national data visualization software company specializing in monitoring and analysis of real-time data. The firm was headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with additional offices in New York City, London, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. It partnered with several large systems integrators and infrastructure software companies, including SAP, Thomson Reuters, Kx Systems, and One Market Data (OneTick). The company's name is derived from the Greek: 'pan' for all, 'optic' for sight. The company name is derived from the word panopticon which is an architectural concept originally intended to facilitate surveillance of prisons.
Contents
- History
- Pre attentive processing
- Technology overview
- Product overview
- Joint ventures and strategic alliances
- References
In August 2013, Panopticon was acquired by Datawatch Corporation.
Panopticon Software was a key player in the data visualization sector along with for example Qliktech, Tableau Software and Tibco Software. Its Swedish origins are shared with GapMinder, Qliktech and Spotfire, making Sweden a centre for Information Visualization research and development.
It historically specialised in selling Treemapping and Heatmap visualisation software and development tools to clients within the financial services and telecommunications industries. It uses a variety of other visual analysis tools in its products, including Scatter Plots, Dot Plots, Pie Charts, Line Graphs, and Bullet Graph visualizations. The company's products are sometimes deployed as Executive Dashboards that allow managers to interact, explore, monitor and analyze rapidly changing and/or large data sets. Panopticon tools are also often embedded in other enterprise applications using the company's software development kit, which is available for Java, Microsoft .NET and the Windows Presentation Foundation. The Panopticon products are optimized for use with real-time data message buses, complex event processing engines, relational databases, and column-oriented databases. and is a regular exhibitor at financial industry events such as Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and SIA.
History
The company was founded in 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the emerging markets brokerage Brunswick Direct before being spun off as a separate entity in 2002. It later was acquired by the UK based Hamsard Group (Hamsard is now known as Cantono Plc), and became a subsidiary of the Group. In March 2007 its competitor Spotfire undertook negotiations with Hamsard Group, to take full ownership of Panopticon. This potential deal was not completed, Spotfire pulling out of negotiations, and itself subsequently being purchased by Tibco. In May 2007 the company was sold back to its founders as part of a management buyout.
In March 2012, the company announced that Omaha Foreign Exchange had deployed Panopticon visual data analysis software within its new facilities to analyze risk, liquidity and other key performance factors.
In May 2012, the company announced that QlikTech had partnered with Panopticon to enable QlikTech clients to embed Panopticon data visualizations into their QlikView dashboards. Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data.
In June 2012, the company announced that SAP was utilizing its Panopticon data visualization tools as the front end for real-time deployments of the SAP HANA in-memory appliance.
In August 2012, the company announced that Campbell & Company, an asset manager with over $3 billion under management, had implemented its advanced data visualization tools as part of a OneTick deployment. Campbell & Co. decided it needed a better way to store, distribute and visualize its data, so it turned to OneMarketData and Panopticon for the solution.
In January 2013, the company announced record results for the previous year with 112% books growth.
In April 2013, Panopticon was selected for inclusion in UBM Tech Channel's CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. The Big Data 100 recognizes innovative technology vendors that help businesses manage "Big Data" — the rapidly increasing volume, variety and velocity of information being generated today. The list covers three categories: business analytics, data management, infrastructure and services. The Big Data 100 includes many established vendors as well as startups and specialized suppliers of niche products that help businesses address Big Data needs.
In April 2013, Panopticon was named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in the Cool Vendors for In-Memory Computing 2013 report by Gartner, Inc. The April 23, 2013 report was co-authored by Roy Schulte, Roxane Edjlali, et al. This is the first year that Gartner has called out In-Memory Computing specifically as a subject for one of its Cool Vendor reports.
In June 2013, Panopticon announced that Tony Evans had joined the company in the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer. Evans will head the growing Panopticon sales and marketing group and work directly and will be part of the company's executive management team. Evans will be based in the company’s expanded New York office.
In August 2013, Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) announced that it had completed its acquisition of Panopticon Software AB.
Pre-attentive processing
Pre-Attentive Processing is a term from the area of human cognitive psychology and refers to the ability of the low-level human visual system to rapidly identify certain basic visual properties. Examples of visual features that can be detected in this way include hue, intensity, enclosure, orientation, size, and motion.
Technology overview
Panopticon's technology relies on in-memory OLAP cubes, which are displayed through a series of visualizations including treemaps. This allows the user to load data, select variables and hierarchical structures, and navigate through the resultant visualization, filtering, zooming and drilling (sometimes called slicing and dicing), to identify outliers, correlations and trends.
Its streaming OLAP implementation takes an in-memory OLAP cube and allows data to be streamed through it. This combination makes the company's products attractive to industry verticals that require live streaming data, such as financial market data utility grid monitoring and telecommunications network traffic analysis. This is very different than the vast majority of OLAP implementations in which cubes are rebuilt periodically for new batches of data.
This support for streaming data with its products has allowed financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase , Citigroup , Citadel , and BlackRock to implement the Panopticon Products within their real-time trading and risk applications. Euromoney has stated that it provides the trader community with a way of quickly digesting information.
Product overview
Panopticon has two platform independent product lines: Its enterprise application, which support enterprise deployments and also provides the ability to embed Panopticon tools into third party applications, and its SDKs in Java language, .NET Framework and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.
Joint ventures and strategic alliances
In February 2012, the company announced the release of a real-time data connector for Oracle CEP; this will allow Oracle customers to utilize Panopticon’s interactive dashboards as the user interface for their CEP-enabled analytical solutions.
In November 2011, Sky Road ASP, a provider of innovative cloud-based solutions to the financial services industry, will integrate Panopticon visualizations into its systems to allow traders and managers to view intraday P&L, exposures and other key parameters using interactive analytical dashboards.
In October 2011, the company announced a strategic relationship with OneMarketData to incorporate Panopticon's real-time data visualizations to OneMarketData's OneTick CEP and database system in order to offer a single solution for tick data management, analytics and complex event processing (CEP).
In June 2011, Portware announced that it will add Panopticon data visualization technology to Portware's suite of global, multi-asset trading systems.
In June 2011, Callidus Software Inc, Sales Performance Management (SPM) company, launched its Sales Performance Visualizer solution that incorporates Panopticon visualization tools.
In May 2011, Imagine Software, a developer of software for hedge funds, asset management firms, pension funds, investment banks, prime brokers, market-makers, and sovereign wealth funds, integrated Panopticon visualizations into its portfolio and risk management system
In May 2011, the company announced that Thomson Reuters is embedding Panopticon visualizations into its Quant trader platform to allow traders and quantitative researchers to analyze and monitor any real-time or historical data series available via Thomson Reuters Velocity Analytics.
In November 2010, the company signed an agreement with Sybase, an SAP company that allows Sybase to Panopticon's enterprise application with other Sybase products including Sybase IQ, Sybase RAP the Trading Edition, the Sybase ESP CEP engine, and Sybase ASE.
In November 2010, GoldenSource announced that it will incorporate Panopticon's data visualization tools into their systems in order to offer clients a more user-friendly front end.
In February 2008, Tbricks, an algo trading software developer, announced the launch of Tbricks Genesis for automated trading of any electronically traded asset class. This system incorporates Panopticon Treemaps and other data visualizations as primary components in the user interface.
In May 2006, Polystar, a developer of telecoms network monitoring software, announced it had become an OEM for Panopticon data visualization technology.
In addition to Sybase and Thomson Reuters, its reseller partners include Bishopsgate Financial, C O M E Computer Systeme GmbH, and Technologies & Finance.