OpenViz Adds Depth To Corporate Apps
As Mark Hammond reported for PC Week, branching out from its roots in scientific, medical and engineering software, Advanced Visual Systems Inc. will begin shipping next week a new development kit to add data visualization and graphics to business applications.
OpenViz is a set of components that provide what the Waltham, Mass., company calls "visual intelligence" for analytic software.
Visualization capabilities woven into analytic applications or front-end tools will enable end users to pan, rotate, zoom and manipulate axes and scales to create multiple displays for data sets, AVS officials said.
The product facilitates filtering data by thresholds and time series as well as drill-downs for multidimensional or relational analysis, and it also supports geospatial data. Both two- and three-dimensional charting capabilities provide flexibility, officials said.
The product, offered for Java and Component Object Model, is targeted for commercial software developers as well as developers in corporate IT organizations, AVS officials said.
Comshare Inc. will use OpenViz to give its financial and budgeting analytic applications rich visual dimensions, said Dave King, Comshare's chief technology officer and senior vice president of product development.
OpenViz's visualization capabilities will improve on the standard charting and graphing in Comshare's BudgetPlus and FDC analytic applications and will enhance its DecisionWeb application development software, said King, in Ann Arbor, Mich. The enhanced Comshare applications are scheduled for delivery this year. "If you can visualize the process, you can see a lot more information than you can just looking at grids, and you can manipulate that information a lot more easily," he said.
AVS' expertise in visualization for scientific and technical applications will serve it well for business applications, King said. "They've been in the scientific visualization business so long that their stuff is really first-class," he said.
AVS is among a handful of developers to deliver new data visualization capabilities for business users. Earlier this year, Visual Insights Inc. and Cognos Corp. each shipped desktop data visualization products.
OpenViz supports Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 95, with support for Solaris and HP-UX to follow. The product costs $7,500 for a single developer license; a 50-user Web deployment is priced at $12,500.
AVS can be contacted at (800) 728-1600 or www.avs.com.