Fractal Edge Helps Remedy Information Overload

One of these promising startups is Fractal Edge, a London-based company that has created several tools that help companies intuitively organize and visualize their mountains of data. Fractal Edge's products were first targeted at the financial services sector but have begun to expand to other industries. The company makes a financial market and portfolio analysis tool and a PC-based Windows file management application as well as a software development kit for creating fractal maps.

Other companies in this increasingly competitive space are Groxis and Anacubis, both of which helps users visualize and organize data with multi-colored icons and exacting links to the specific information the users seek. Fractal maps are less flashy than these offerings, but, their advocates say, more effective for handling large amounts of data.

The maps are color-coded and have zoomable screens that help users easily spot and focus on the data points they need rather than scrolling or toggling through various PC windows. "The maps are beguiling; they make you wonder why people didn't think of them before," says Gervaise Clifton-Bligh, founder and technical director of Fractal Edge. "We provide a way of representing reference points very easily within a map so the user can drill down and make decisions. During product demonstrations it's blindingly obvious that fractal maps are more powerful than windows."

"They help you see patterns of performance in your office and compare them with those in other offices on a deeper level than whether they're on or off budget," says Fractal Edge managing director Richard Laughton.

The maps are best deployed as add-on applications to broader enterprise suites such as the ones offered by Apariq, a knowledge management solutions provider and systems integrator in Gaithersburg, MD. Apariq includes the Fractal Edge products in the solutions it sells to its government and commercial clients, most of whom use it to assess financial implications of business decisions or monitor their companies' compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley. Company president Gil Lucas says the technology is best appreciated when combined with a broader application environment. "On its own it's like having HDTV capability without the programming," he says. "It's a really great visual tool, but you have to put something behind it to demonstrate its value to the customer."

That value is the technology's ability to simplify the way key people in a company,usually ones without a lot of technical or statistical expertise,evaluate and respond to data. "Our customers have difficulty wading through massive amounts of data quickly," Lucas says. "This is a huge advance to help decision-makers act more quickly by helping them look across their organization and spot anomalies more easily. When you see the technology's ability to look at the performance of 11,000 Nasdaq stocks as they change every few seconds, it's very impressive."

Fractal Edge is in the early stages of expanding its US partner network to include more companies like Apariq, and the company is well aware of the role resellers play in taking a technology from merely cool to must have. "We're partnering with Nokia, IBM and systems integrators," Laughton says. "We have lots of clients who buy services around the products, and an expanded channel will help us get the message out to as many people as possible."