Visual Insights Announces Data Visualization Software Available in ActiveX Components
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Visual Insights announced the commercial release of what it claimed is the industry's first interactive data visualization software available in components based on Microsoft's ActiveX control architecture. Visual Insights, a wholly owned venture of Lucent Technologies, offers a unique software product, developed at Bell Laboratories, that uncovers and displays trends and patterns often buried in large amounts of data.

The Visual Insights Developer's Toolkit allows companies to easily incorporate visualization into existing data mining and analysis applications and to create new stand-alone visualization applications. With the Visual Insights Developer's Toolkit, data warehousing and data mining companies can differentiate and improve their products by providing end users with an easy way to access, analyze, and understand large amounts of data. This software is key in helping business managers use corporate data to make faster, more cost effective, fact-based decisions.

IBM and Intel developers used the Visual Insights Developer's Toolkit to create a demonstration for the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The 16-node cluster demonstration used multiple Pentium (R) II Xeon processors. Two hundred gigabytes of U.S. demographic data, segmented into 70 fields, were processed by an IBM data mining program. Then the results were fed into the Visual Insights data visualization software and displayed via a Web browser.

The Visual Insights software can quickly display the relationship between the data in one field -- say, age of the population -- and the variables represented by any of the other fields, such as type of car owned, educational level, number of pets, size of house, or U.S. regional area.

At the IDF demonstration, Visual Insights software provided the interactive and graphical environment that displays the rules used in the data query, allowing users to explore and validate the relationships in the data set.

Managers can use Visual Insights software to explore patterns and trends in business data that can lead to better tactical decisions. For example, when customer data is combined with sales transaction data, a retail chain can gain a better understanding of customers' needs and use this information to implement one-to-one marketing programs that are designed to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Hypotheses about customer segments can be validated, and stores will have a much clearer sense of what types of campaigns work in different regions of the country. Consumers will benefit by receiving "custom-tailored" promotions designed to their needs.

"Intel is very excited about today's demonstration at IDF," said Mitch Shults, Director of Server Platform Marketing, Intel Corporation. " Virtual Interface Architecture based solutions -- such as those using Visual Insights software and the Intel P2XP -- enable a new class of scalable cluster products offering high performance, low total cost of ownership, and broad applicability."

"With this new visualization ability, organizations can now quickly and easily analyze and understand their data," said Hershel Harris, director, database technology, IBM Software Solutions. "This is a terrific opportunity for customers to benefit from a solution by Visual Insights and IBM, the leader in business intelligence applications which brings organizations' data to life. Data mining with DB2 Universal Database and IBM's integrated data mining technology is made more powerful when the Visual Insights software is part of the solution, helping our customers turn information into insight."

Visual Insights is currently offering an introductory package to the Visual Insights Developer's Toolkit. For a limited time, companies may purchase a one-year, non-commercial license for the Visual Insights Developer's Toolkit that includes a one-day training session and customer support. Companies can then learn about and build data visualization applications without a large up-front investment.

The price of this introductory package is $25,000 for companies with fewer than 200 employees and $50,000 for companies with more than 200 employees. Half of this initial investment can be applied to future Visual Insights contacts.

Visual Insights also announced it is now selecting beta customers for its Visual Insights Software for Distributed Applications, which uses data visualization technology to allow companies to monitor, analyze, and improve the performance of their business critical applications over time.

Visual Insights, headquartered at Naperville, Illinois, is a wholly owned venture of Lucent that designs, builds, and delivers software solutions that revolutionize customer decision making and analysis by providing world class data visualization. Its software solutions are in use today in telecommunications, consumer marketing, fraud prevention, and software development applications. Its web site is http://www.visualinsights.com

Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at http://www.lucent.com