US technology: Tools help with info overload

Economist Intelligence Unit - Executive Briefing
© 2003 The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd.

With all of the data from spreadsheets, enterprise resource planning software, databases and customer relationship management applications circulating today at international companies, many firms lack a clear understanding of what all their data means. It’s an old problem that seems to get worse with the appearance of every new source of data.

But new help is on the way from software applications meant to make sense of data overload. Several new and emerging products were displayed and discussed in late March at PC Forum, an upper-crust technology get-together that industry expert Esther Dyson holds each year in the Arizona desert in the US.

Several of the software products, most of them from start-ups, present data in a visual way so that executives can quickly pinpoint the information they’re seeking, either by recognizing a color or shape in a data chart. Groxis of Sausalito, Calif., Anacubis Info of Cambridge, England and London’s Fractal Edge all showed off tools that ease navigation with visualization tools that, for example, help a stock broker pinpoint a troubled stock sector by a its colored representation in a graph.

The effectiveness of such tools is best understood in a demonstration – a picture tells the story better than words. But all of the products access huge amounts of data, helping users to analyse information with interactive and customisable shapes, colors and links.

Fractal Edge, for example, is already working with stock-market data provider Bloomberg to quickly display overviews of global, national, regional or even sectoral markets. To see how technology stocks are doing around the globe, for example, it can be easier to find a red icon in one of Fractal Edge’s zoom-able charts than to scan screens and screens of database windows. Datamonitor analyst Andreas Kolind, has called the software "innovative yet intuitive"

Fractal Edge is targeting its product to information firms such as Bloomberg to integrate into their products and offer it to their clients.

Another firm, Anacubis, also runs its products on top of another firm’s databases. Anacubis is an two-year-old startup that has spun out from i2 group, a firm well-known in the European law-enforcement market.

Working in partnership with LexisNexis and Dun & Bradstreet, the Anacubis software displays data-search results with colorful icons connected by annotated links. To gain recognition and awareness of the software’s prowess, the firm soon plans to launch a free version of it running on the Internet on top of the popular search engine Google.

Groxis, founded in 2000, is selling both to corporations and to individuals. For example, the carpet company Interface is using Groxis's Grokker software to help launch its consumer business. Interface has used Grokker to design a Web-based application that lets shoppers visualize how Interface's carpet tiles might look in various configurations.

Groxis also sells an inexpensive version of Grokker directly to consumers, who, for example can use it to visually display gift-buying options at Amazon, whether organized by price, consumer-ranking or how new a piece of merchandise is. Or they can visualize data on a certain topic in conjunction with research at Teoma.com, a popular search-engine. Chief technology officer Jean-Michel Decombe refers to Grokker it as "a personal data-mining tool."

But not all of the products at PC Forum take a graphical approach. C-Evidence, from Cataphora of Redwood City, Calif., for example, generates text-based reconstructions of communications records for legal purposes, such as the discovery process before a trial.
Founded only last year, Cataphora has developed a tool that analyses e-mail, instant-messaging, phone-call data and other communications records to reconstruct information needed by attorneys. Future versions may be tailored for other industries such as pharmaceuticals and national security.

New US legislation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that demands executive accountability for corporate financial information, may spur interest in the firm as corporate counsel look for evidence showing that executives did or did not have access to certain financial information at a certain point in the company's history. Says founder Elizabeth Charnock, "Every publicly traded company needs us or something like us."

For companies already successfully aggregating data from a variety of sources, software from San Francisco-based Versalent can be used to design a front end for presenting that data in a useable format. A key selling point for the software is that it lets companies build this unifying interface into a Web browser. That saves time and cost because there is no need to install new software on desktops across the corporation or to train staff members on how to use a new interface. One of Versalent’s financial clients has already used the software to create a data view integrating a myriad of accounts from a variety of financial institutions.

Several European online retailers are already buying software and services from London’s Electrobug, whose tools automate the collection and comparison of data from the Internet. With Electrobug, for example, a company can quickly and easily find out what competing retailers are charging for identical or even similar products. The firm said it is looking to expand and garner more American clients.

In addition to better understanding the competition, firms sometimes need help understanding themselves. Entopia of Belmont, California already has 40 customers for its K-Bus software, which categorizes the knowledge level of a company's staff. Based on things such as how often a staff member creates or edits materials on a given subject, the software can let a chief executive, for example, quickly find the person on his staff who has the best knowledge of an emerging sector - before making a pitch to a potential client in that sector.

Even Microsoft is jumping into the data-overload fray, showing off a "relationship viewer" called Polyarchy. At PC Forum, Microsoft demonstrated the software analysing hierarchical relationships between various members of the Microsoft staff. For global companies with tens of thousands of employees, the software can help display which staff members from different departments or countries are working on a given project, or how two sales representatives may be courting the same client.

Still, the uses for Polyarchy are not limited to corporate organisation charts – Microsoft says some companies that have been testing the still-unreleased software have been using Polyarchy for visualising relationships between medications or car parts. The software should be available sometime this year.