20120320

Panopticon partners with Qliktech

In unusual, interesting (what it means? is it promising or what?) move the two Data Visualization leaders (Panopticon and Qliktech) partners today, see


http://panopticon.com/Panopticon-Software-Partners-with-QlikTech-to-Provide-Real-Time-Visual-Data-Monitoring-and-Analysis-Dashboards

"to offer enhanced, real-time visualization capabilities for the QlikView Business Discovery platform".


Panopticon's press-release looks overly submissive to me:


"As a member of QlikTech's Qonnect Partner Program for Technology Partners, Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data. By integrating Panopticon into their systems, QlikView users can:



The combined Panopticon-QlikView platform is now available for immediate installation."


Panopticon integration into QlikView dashboards utilizes QlikView UI extension objects within the web browser. The extension object calls Panopticon "web parts" and creates a Panopticon extension object with a number of pre-defined properties. The defined context/data is passed into the Panopticon extension object. The Panopticon "web parts" call a Panopticon EX Java applet and renders the requested Panopticon visualization workbook within the context defined by the QlikView user. The Panopticon component executes parameterized URL calls and parameterized JavaScripts to update the parent QlikView display.


Qliktech is trying to be politically correct and its Michael Saliter, Senior Director Global Market Development - Financial Services at QlikTech said, "Our partnership with Panopticon allows us to incorporate leading real-time visualization capabilities into our QlikView implementations. We recognize the importance of providing our clients with truly up-to-date information, and this new approach supports that initiative. Our teams share a common philosophy about proper data visualization design. This made it easy to develop a unified approach to the presentation of real-time, time series, and static data in ways that people can understand in seconds."


While I like when competitors are cooperating (it benefits users and hopefully improve sales for both vendors), I still have a question: Qliktech got a lot of money from IPO, had a lot of sales and hired a lot of people lately; why they (Qlikview Developers) was not able to develop real-time functionality themselves?


Hugh Heinsohn, VP of Panopticon, said to me: "we (Panopticon) don’t see ourselves as competitors – and neither do they (Qliktech). When you get into the details, we do different things and we’re working together closely now"

Another indirect sign of relationship between Panopticon and Qliktech is the recent inclusion of Måns Hultman, former CEO of QlikTech into the list of advisors for Panopticon's Board of Directors.


Other questions are rising too: if Qliktech suddenly is open to integration with Panopticon, why not to integrate with Quantrix and R Library (I proposed integration with R a while ago). Similar questions applicable to Tableau Software...

2 comments:

  1. i have a wild guess here... Qliktech see Tableau success with their drag & drop UI and want one for them self as well so they partner with panopticon to supply exactly that.....
    sounds reasonable?

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  2. Interesting post, Andrei. I think it is important to remember that streaming data is very different from static data. Real-time analysis is not the same as just calculating very quickly. The application needs to be able to handle differences in stream latency, interruptions, restarts, late-arriving data and so on.

    In short, the QlikView engine can refresh over a *dataset* very quickly, giving near real time analysis to many customers. But true real-time handling of *streams* is a completely different architecture and requirement.

    Integrating that capability from a specialist partner into our associative, exploratory user interface is a win for everyone.

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