Panopticon Releases Data Visualization Tools for Real-Time Message Queues and CEP Data Streams

Panopticon Software, a provider of visual analysis software, announced that it has released new data visualization tools for real-time message queues and complex event processing data streams.

The vendor released new versions of its two flagship products - the Panopticon Developer SDK and the Panopticon EX enterprise application - allowing business users to build and deploy real-time business intelligence dashboards quickly.

The new products incorporate a number of major improvements over previous versions, including the ability to connect to message buses such as Progress SonicMQ and to Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines including Sybase Aleri.

Panopticon's visual analysis software is used across the trading life cycle, from investment research, pre-trade analytics, trading (including basket trading), post trade, and real-time market risk monitoring. It provides the ability to monitor streaming data sets to identify breaches and drill into historic time series data to validate whether a breach is unusual or a regular occurrence.

Panopticon EX is designed for fast deployment at the enterprise level. It incorporates a comprehensive Designer component that allows business users to build and publish their own streaming dashboards.

The 5.4 release of EX incorporates a number of important advances, including the ability to natively connect to the SonicMQ message bus from Progress Software and to cross tab or trellis visualizations containing static, time series and real time streaming data.

In addition, the new release includes new financial visualizations like the Surface Plot (also called a Contour Plot), Numeric Line Graphs (for displaying Yield Curves) and Needle Graphs (for displaying transaction magnitude and frequency).

The software also includes connectors for many relational databases, including: DB2, Oracle, Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, MS SQL Server, and MySQL. Users can easily federate data from multiple sources (including real-time streams), create calculations spanning refreshed and streaming data sources and display the results in interactive visualizations and multi-tabbed dashboards. Panopticon Developer is a Software Development Kit (SDK) that works with .NET (WinForm & WebForm), Java and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) environments and allows developers to embed Panopticon visual analysis capabilities in client applications. The new release of the SDK provides the new visualizations and cross tabbing capabilities also found in EX.

It provides the ability to embed EX workbooks into custom Java and/or WPF client applications with little to no coding. The SDK supports all of the capabilities found in Panopticon EX and provides fully interactive visual analysis capabilities in Java and WPF environments. With the SDK, users can also change the design of dashboards on the fly at run time, which allows users - not programmers - to modify the user interface as needed. The Developer SDK also supports the ability to call events in the system it is embedded in; for example, when embedded in a market monitoring application, a user can execute trades from within a dashboard. Both Panopticon EX and the Developer SDK include the StreamCube OLAP Data Model which enables very fast filtering and screening of multi-dimensional data as well as the ability to alter the data hierarchy on-the-fly. When the user manipulates a visualization using the controls provided with the SDK or EX, the data model does the calculations necessary to display the information. The StreamCube can interact with any number of disparate data repositories ranging from traditional relational databases like Oracle or Sybase to event-driven message buses.

Peter Simpson, Panopticon's VP of Research and Development, said, "All the major features in these two new releases were based on input from some of our largest customers. They need to monitor and analyze wide varieties of data from multiple sources, including SonicMQ topics. They also wanted it to take less time to create, build and deploy analytical dashboards for their users. Our development team has accomplished this magnificently. With the new SDK, it's now possible to go from start to finish on a significant development project in less than a day. The new connectors for SonicMQ and CEP engines are just the beginning. We see the join between real-time monitoring and analysis together with historic time series analysis capabilities as a central requirement for our customers - particularly in capital markets and telecoms - and we will support many additional real-time and CEP capabilities in future upgrades and products."

Melanie Rodier has worked as a print and broadcast journalist for over 10 years, covering business and finance, general news, and film trade news. Prior to joining Wall Street & Technology in April 2007, Melanie lived in Paris, where she worked for the International Herald ... View Full Bio