anacubis, a privately held firm founded in 2001 and with offices in Springfield, Va., and Cambridge, U.K., is a relatively young entrant into the market. It's backed by a parent company, the i2 Group, which has more than a decade of expertise delivering visualization and analysis software solutions to federal law enforcement and intelligence professionals. Users of i2 software include more than 2,000 organizations with 30,000+ licenses. anacubis is leveraging that technology and extensive expertise to provide visual research and analysis solutions to enterprise customers. The company has been working at a "frantic pace," according to product manager Paul Stefan. The v.1.0 anacubis Desktop was introduced in September 2003, 2.0 was introduced in April 2004, and now 3.0 is being introduced in October 2004.

anacubis stresses that it is not just another visual search engine. It does visualize the results of searches to show how companies, people, and associated entities are related through the use of intuitive icons and links. But, unlike other visual search engines, it enables query results from multiple sources to be combined, revealing complex relationships within the data—and it retains all the underlying data from the original sources. It excels in providing a consolidated view of diverse business sources, but also in offering powerful drill-down capabilities enabling in-depth analysis.

anacubis Desktop 3.0 now offers support for Microsoft Access, Oracle, and SQL-based databases. These complement the existing Microsoft Excel and HTML importers and information available from anacubis-enabled online providers, such as D&B, Hoover's, LexisNexis, and Questel•Orbit. Stefan said the company is trying to work out agreements with other online providers. At this point the product works with structured data and semi-structured documents and files.

A new categorization feature lets users create categories based on the properties of entities. For example, a researcher could instantly group all the companies in a chart based in a specific country or in a certain revenue range.

I was particularly impressed with the new Find Path feature that lets users take any two entities in a document and find the path (all the links and linked entities) between these two entities. The company says this has significant potential in the fields of customer relationship management and sales and marketing intelligence, enabling the identification of individuals linked to existing bids or projects and using that information to assess potential future opportunities.

Susan Feldman, IDC's research vice president for content technologies, said: "Making sense of what you find is now the challenge. IDC believes that visual tools that can help users understand the information that is contained in a set of search results will soon become a requirement for working with large and varied sets of information sources. By pulling together people, places, and things, and their relationships to each other in a quick visual interface, we can begin to discern trends and patterns that are not readily apparent. Visual tools are necessary if we are to deal with vast amounts of information in an expeditious manner."

anacubis Desktop 3.0 is available to download for a free 10-day trial. A one-off single user license is $2,950. The Intellectual Property Analysis add-in is available on a subscription basis for $750 per year, including all product updates.

Stefan says the company is now developing additional add-ins based on customers' needs, which it expects to introduce in 2005. It is working on add-ins to provide analysis for news, CRM applications, and for financial services.

Even a graphically challenged, left-brained, text-oriented person like me can appreciate and marvel at the discovery possibilities and analytical capabilities of anacubis Desktop 3.0. To get a taste of it and experience the flexible drill-down features, view the demo on the anacubis Web site of Hoover's visual company search.

For an overview of information visualization software tools, including the 2.0 version of anacubis Desktop, see the cover story by Judith Gelernter in the October Searcher, "Infoviz for Info Pros".

The October 2004 issue of EContent features an in-depth review of anacubis Desktop 3.0 (available in print now and online on Oct. 20 at http://www.econtentmag.com). In the review, J.T. Johnson calls this a "novel and sophisticated tool." He notes that the price is not trivial and there's a substantial learning curve, but he said "the potential rewards are great for analysts and companies willing to take the long view."