Since that article additional value
has been exponentially created. Using their
higher stock price they smartly allocated the capital they created to make a critical BI industry game
changing synergistic acquisition for Panopticon, a Swedish software developer
of data visualization tools.
Now with the future integrated
products their software solutions will allow them to compete directly with
Tableau (DATA) , Splunk (SPLK) and many other BI related vendors.
I was lucky to stumble upon this
article published 09/30/13 in Datanami, Datawatch's Big Visualization Strategyfor Data. by Alex Woodie
The article was so well written I'm going to take parts and paste below in italics and quotes.
Datawatch was interested in doing what
“vendors like Tableau Software and QlikTech were doing with data visualization”.
"We started evaluating
companies we felt could add the capability to visualize the vast majority of
data we were looking for," says Ben Plummer, a BI industry veteran who
joined Datawatch recently as its chief marketing officer and senior vice
president of strategic alliances. "We looked at eight to 10 companies, to
be honest. Michael and I had both looked at Panopticon in the past. I looked at it when I was an IBM, and he looked at it
while he was at Applix."
“Datawatch has already completed the first phase of integrating
the Windows-based desktop interfaces for the two products. Full integration
of the desktops and server components will take one to two years.”The eventual goal is to
deliver a single product that combines Datawatch's capability to ingest and
understand less-structured data sources with Panopticon's data visualization
and exploration capability, and to bring the resulting technology to bear
against both historical and real-time stream data. Few vendors, if any, can
offer this capability today, Plummer says.
"The vision of Datawatch
2.0 is to deliver a soup-to-nuts product that gives customers the capability to
analyze all of their data assets. "We want to give customers the
capability to combine traditional structured data, unstructured data, and real
time data to deliver both historical perspective and operational intelligence
simultaneously," Plummer says. "Right now, there's no other
technology in the industry doing this."
In the near future,
Datawatch will announce a new in-memory database technology for the Panopticon
piece, Plummer says. This will give customers the capability to visualize
larger data sets than they currently can, he says. This will be useful for
exploring historical data, but it won't be of much use for the real-time
component, where data is in and out of the Datawatch software very quickly.
For now, the focus is on
competing with the likes of Tableau, and maximizing the present, or what
Plummer calls "real real time."
"We're literally able
to take streaming data directly from its origin--whether it's coming from a
trading system or machine sensor or a message bus--ingest it and visualize that
immediately," he says. "The other vendors out there ingest it, put it
in a database, and then visualize it. We're real real time, which makes us
different. And we can do the historical stuff too. And then the question is, do
we want to go and predict the future with that? It's always a possibility." Source
The bottom line ,
I see them immediately being able to make a serious run against Tableau (DATA) and
Splunk (SPLK).
Tableau (DATA) is a nice
piece of software but is more of a one trick pony, in my opinion. I’m sure they
will try to address that issue in the future. Tableau is good software for graphs. It pivots data similar
to Excel’s Pivot table functionality. The data must be in a structured table
format to ingest. The data is then identified as either a dimension (text data)
or measures (numerical data). Then you have options to drag the dimensions to columns
or rows. After that you select what measures/numerical data you want to see as
it relates your selected dimensions in the columns or rows combination. You can
also filter the data just like an Excel pivot table. Finally there is a show me
option that allows you to select what kind of view is best for the data. You
can select bar chart, pie chart, circle plot, scatter plot, table, heat maps,
tree map, gannt chart, bubbles or maps. It’s a nice function.
I see Datawatch as having
a tremendous advantage over Tableau for some the following reasons but not nearly all. Datawatch
software lets you access any structured, semi structured or unstructured data sources. You can combine that
data with existing relied upon reports or data researched on the internet by saving
as txt,xps or html.You can also
quickly join on the fly to internal Access queries or Excel models. You get the
idea and potential with unlimited data flexibility and access. Now add that to a world class real time visual data discover with Panopticon.
Splunk (splk) analyzes
machine data. Machine data means they look at log files, that's all. Then they can search for key words or phrases.
That data is then graphed. Datawatch has been analyzing log files for about 20 years.
Datawatch has not put any direct effort
to sell into that space. But now with Panopticon game on. One of many advantages
with the Datawatch solution is they don’t just search for keywords like Splunk but instead parse the data into usable relatable data that
can be further enhanced from other sources. Yes Panopitcon visual discovery is
more advanced than Splunk. It would not surprise me if Splunk embedded panopticon
into their software for better visualizations. Many well known software vendors have
purchased the rights to use Panopticon advance visual capabilities.
Sorry Splunk but Panopticon
has been detecting fraud, anomalies or just identifying opportunities within the uber high risk world of wall
street's best risk management shops. They have also helped identify opportunities
to increase profits, reduce operational and investment risks with their visual
data monitoring and analysis tools in real time.This all before Splunk was a company.
I’m excited for Datawatch’s future as a long term customer that expects additional useful analytical
functionality and a long term investor.
LONG DWCH
