Datawatch acquires Panopticon for its visualization software

Contact: Tejas Venkatesh

Datawatch is buying Swedish data visualization software vendor Panopticon Software for $31.4m in stock (Datawatch ended March 2013 with just $10m in its treasury). The deal fills an important product gap in Datawatch’s portfolio, adding real-time data visualization software to its back-end-oriented portfolio and furthering its positioning around ‘big data’ visual discovery. On the announcement of the acquisition, Datawatch traded up more than 15% on the Nasdaq.

Panopticon adds a presentation layer to Datawatch’s back-end capture and transformation wares for semi-structured and unstructured information. The startup’s technology includes an internally developed StreamCube in-memory OLAP data model and visualization layer, which includes heat maps and tree maps.

Three-fourths of Panopticon’s business comes from partner-driven deals in the financial services industry, due to its applicability for visual analysis with sub-second latency for trading and risk applications, for example. SAP and Thomson Reuters are reportedly Panopticon’s two largest partners. We’ll have a full report on this transaction in our next Daily 451.

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