Antarctica Targets BPM, Raises $4.2m

Business Intelligence By Madan Sheina

Technology start-up Antarctica Systems Inc is now targeting its data visualization software at the red-hot business performance management (BPM) market and has raised a further round of capital funding.

The Vancouver, Canada-based firm, which was founded in 1999 by XML co-inventor and Open Text Corp founder Tim Bray, has raised $4.2m in its second round of funding. The money will be directed at operational expansion and helping the company reposition itself.

The company's flagship product is Visual Net, a complementary tool for business intelligence (BI) providing data exploration and discovery. It uses visual metaphors to help users analyze business issues and pinpoint key questions in the data. The last major release was Visual Net 4.0 last October - with a point (4.2) release this March. Version 5 is expected in December and will include a revamped user interface, better handling of advanced queries, and more embedded analytics.

Founder Bray has since left the company to join Sun Microsystems Inc.  But Tawfik Hammoud, Antarctica's recently appointed vice president of marketing and corporate development, spoke to ComputerWire about the company's plans for BPM.

Hammoud said that "despite the ability of BPM systems to churn out lots of reports and dashboards many companies continue to lack visibility into performance, particularly the root causes of performance exceptions. But the last thing that business users want is more reports."

"Nor do we offer a set of KPIs or scorecards. We're simply allowing the vast majority of business users to gain visibility into information that already exists; we're not adding to that data.

Hammoud said the company "isn't reinventing a new way of displaying data." Rather he believes the company's visual dashboard approach brings a new meaning to the term visibility through carefully considered visual page displays - as opposed to standard tables of numbers - that reveals greater and hidden insights tucked away in the data. "Most BPM solutions are designed to answer predefined questions. Our visual software helps [businesses] answer questions that they never knew [they] had."

This is where the underlying rationale behind Visual Net comes into play - that the human mind can more easily glean insights from visual data rather than text. "We can process seven dimensions visually," Hammoud said. He cited the example of a customer that recently brought 125 reports down to 2 Visual Net screens. "This is the kind of value that we bring to the table."

Hammoud said that VisualNet is architected to run on top of BPM systems. "We already have users running VisualNet against all the major ERP systems and large BI tool providers...Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, Information Builders and so on." "Because we're browser-based all you need is an ability to access a database. We don't query live data but make copies which allows for tremendous performance."

Hammoud acknowledges this off-line approach limits the software's real-time capabilities, but says "only a few people dream or care about real-time visualizations right now." Given the company's diminutive size and market standing, Hammoud believes that partnerships are key. He said the company had several important OEM partnerships right now but was not at liberty to give more specifics. BPM solutions providers are now top of his list.

A partner approach has certainly helped another data visualization start-up, Inxight Software Inc, to penetrate the large installed bases of SAP AG and SAS Institute Inc.

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