Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Business analytics can help organizations use data to find insights that lead to new opportunities and address issues unrecognized before. One player in this market is Datawatch, known for its tools for information optimization and harvesting value from big data including content and documents. I assessed the company earlier this year, and recently our firm recognized its customers’ achievements with 2013 Ventana Research Leadership Awards for Information Optimization with Phelps County Regional Medical Center and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) with The Fauquier Bank.

Datawatch has made news with its acquisition of Panopticon, a Swedish provider of business visualization and analytics for not only data but events and messages as well. Panopticon’s innovations in analytical discovery are not widely recognized yet but look forward to them getting recognition moving forward. Of the four types of analytical discovery I have described (data, visual, event and information), Panopticon addresses the first three and Datawatch the last though they already have experience with data. The combined company could simplify the portfolio of tools business people and analysts need to produce analytics and insights. Their capabilities enable users to go far beyond the reporting and dashboard approach of conventional business intelligence tools.

Panopticon has been steadily advancing its technology, developing interactive visual discovery of data in real time from many sources, including complex event processing, message queues and polling. Its tools also take data from relational databases and big data technologies like SAP HANA and blend it with proprietary sources to meet users’ specific strategic and operational needs. They use in-memory computing and analytics to process data and events on the fly, creating specialized time windows in which to analyze and visualize information. Panopticon Designer provides access to various sources of data that can be brought into its environment using prebuilt connectors. Panopticon’s technology operates on the Web and offers a mobile capability that connects to a server-based environment. It also can be embedded in other environments, which its software partners CallidusCloud, Deltek and NICE Systems do to value add to their applications. I am impressed that Panopticon also is on the cutting edge of integrating to sources such as SAP HANA. It goes beyond what SAP and others offer today, offering full integration of SAP in-memory computing called SAP HANA and can simultaneously integrate real-time events from SAP Sybase ESP and others. SAP itself highlighted Panopticon and these capabilities at its press conference in 2012. However, since SAP began working on its own technology for this, SAP Lumira, it has been less eager to welcome partners in business analytics, as I have pointed out.

Panopticon had made progress in customer deployments in North America, and that should increase as part of Datawatch and help expand it further globally. Panopticon’s approach has appealed to financial services companies and specific risk management needs. Our research into governance, risk and compliance finds large potential in new technology to identify and manage risks faster, which 79 percent of organizations are seeking and which Panopticon can supply. Advanced analytics that handle more information can more easily address risk and fraud issues than do older tools for reporting or monitoring.

Panopticon’s support of technology events that are flowing across a network can also addresses a growing demand for what we call operational intelligence. Our research finds that 63 percent of organizations consider visualizing events important, and as the chart shows, their primary goals for operational intelligence, both named by 59 percent of organizations, are to manage performance better and detect fraud or security problems. As well, our latest research into the technology innovations of big data and business analytics finds that visual discovery is a much desired capability not available in most organizations today; beyond that businesses need access to all types of data, events and information to provide insights for analysts or management. Panopticon delivers more than data visualization which is why this company and products are significant opportunity for Datawatch to shape and grow the full potential of this acquisition.

Datawatch is addressing my colleague’s view on the four pillars of big data analytics which is part of our research and helping organizations gain business value from big data. For Datawatch this step moves them to help organizations realize the full value of information optimization including from big data investments as I have pointed out that are essential for almost every organization. By acquiring Panopticon and integrating to Datawatch will introduce a new breed of technology to handle the broad spectrum of information for discovery (including the use of visualization) and to generate insights that will bring value to big data investments and business processes.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer