Vancouver — What used to take three hours of data analysis will take Rick Fantham three minutes when he uses visual software that displays all of his company's data at a glance.

By viewing sales figures such as inventory levels and profit margins on an interactive map instead of a spreadsheet, Mr. Fantham can click and zoom quickly into trouble spots.

“We can drill down to the lowest level of detail once a problem has been identified at a higher level. All this information exists in our [present] system but it takes too long to find where the problem really is,” said Mr. Fantham, president of Emco Distribution, a building materials wholesaler.

The visualization technology Mr. Fantham will begin to use this month is developed by Antarctica Systems Inc.,a Vancouver-based firm founded by Tim Bray. It's one of a handful of startups developing software that manage data bottlenecks by breaking data into categories and displaying it graphically.

As an alternative to spreadsheets and lengthy lists of search results, these tools categorize data in a variety of shapes, colours and themes.

The timing couldn't be better as an overabundance of information has created a market desperate for help to make sense of it all.

David Senf, senior analyst at International Data Corp., said understanding data will be a top IT priority for Canadian companies in 2004. “We will see business analytics applications outpacing the software industry as a whole.”

Good news for Antarctica, whose initial investor feedback was that their technology was just another pretty face. “The challenge for visualization companies is that they've typically been a technology solution looking for a problem,” said Barry Yates, chief executive officer of Antarctica. After pushing the software's “search and retrieval” features to research industries, Mr. Yates said there was interest but “no one was prepared to pay serious dollars for it.”

“What we've found is that most companies are drowning in data. Companies have looked to business intelligence solutions to help them make sense of it,” Mr. Yates said. Antarctica has repositioned itself to target industries with large amounts of “quantitative data” such as the financial and government sectors. After having a tough time raising capital in 2002, Antarctica expects to reach profitability this quarter with sales from $5-million to $10-million by year-end.

IDC's Mr. Senf said the ability to open up access to a company's assets will be a major selling point. With pricing for business intelligence programs beginning at six figures, getting employee eyeballs focused on enterprise data “is the key to realizing a high return on investment.”

California-based Groxis Inc. develops a plug-in, called Grokker, that can “search anything.” In seconds, the software converts text lists of search results into graphical maps. All possible categories of information related to the search query are presented in different-sized spheres. A search of “Picasso,” for example, brings up a series of uneven-sized circles labelled “artists,” “style,” “the cubists” and so on. Click on a circle and you drill further down to more specific information and Web links. The search tool is gaining popularity with e-commerce sites such as Amazon and InterfaceFlor.

Because Grokker piggybacks on the Web's popular search engines, it's often considered a competitor to the Web tool-du-jour Google. Chief technology officer and co-founder Jean Michel Decombe sees his company's software as complementary to search engines.

Currently working on their third round of financing since 2001, Groxis's strategy “to be ubiquitous” appears to have traction. January's release of Grokker2 generated more revenue than its previous version did in all of 2003.

“We know that sight is the most developed sense in humans. You can play with all visual aspects [in Grokker] and that is helpful for people to grasp a lot of information in little time,” Mr. Decombe said.

A similar product from France-based Kartoo Technologies embeds its visual mapping tool into business-to-business e-commerce sites. A search of the word “photocopiers,” for example, produces interactive “buttons” shaped like sheets of paper with headings such as “officedepot.com” and “electronics-how stuff works.” Move the cursor over a “button” and text information such as product reviews, appears on the left side of the screen.

Special to The Globe and Mail