Endeca and Oculus Info Inc., today announced a new technology partnership to bolster Endeca's search, navigation and analysis products with Oculus' next-generation information visualization capabilities. Starting with Endeca Latitude, Endeca's revolutionary, new information access and analysis solution, Oculus will provide unique, high-value information visualization to help users quickly analyze and drill into customer, market, sales and other aggregate and transactional data.

The unique combination exposes details and "the big picture" in a single, comprehensible view. As a result, anomalies and patterns in data can be shown that provide insight not possible with tables, dials and simplistic dashboards. While many reporting techniques allow non-technical business users -- from detailed analysts to front line workers -- to drill-down into data, the combined offering from Endeca and Oculus lets users move through an analysis more fluidly, with context, to get answers not possible with traditional business intelligence solutions.

A sample Endeca Latitude implementation leveraging Oculus Visualization is shown below:


An Oculus visualization of a dataset in Endeca Latitude.
The visualization provides metric summaries along the left, Guided Navigation along the right, and a visual representation of summary and transaction details in the center. (View larger image)

First unveiled in March 2005, Endeca Latitude represents a new kind of analysis tool that blends the speed and simplicity of search engines, with the power of robust business intelligence offerings. It gives users the unprecedented ability to quickly and easily explore, drill into and analyze information from multiple data and content silos using all of the attributes and dimensions of the data. This is done through a combination of Endeca's award-winning text and linguistic search capabilities and patent-pending Guided Navigation technology -- allowing users to aggregate, slice, dice, navigate and pivot highly dimensional business data. As a result, users can serve themselves, rather than having to rely on information technology specialists or other analysts to provide canned reports or custom views of data.

Oculus' visualization capabilities allow large amounts of complex information to be conveyed in an intuitive, easy to understand, easy to use manner. Rather than getting lost in successive levels of drill-down, visualization helps reveal areas of sparse data and dense data, thereby assisting users find pertinent information. Visualizations built by Oculus will leverage Endeca Latitude's unique capabilities, including Guided Navigation and direct transaction-level data access -- and will offer new ways to expose and help find anomalies and patterns of interest.

"Oculus visualizations provide rich interfaces for rapid exploration and comprehension of data," says Richard Brath, Senior Director of Business Development at Oculus. "Coupled with Endeca's abilities to guide navigation and move seamlessly between aggregate and transaction data, customers will be able to use focused visualization solutions to make reporting and analysis easier to use than ever before."

"Endeca focuses on making information easy to navigate, analyze, and search and this capability is enhanced with Oculus' visualization," says Vinay Seth Mohta, product manager for Endeca Latitude. "Endeca gets the right information to the desktop and Oculus visualizes it so that it can be used more efficiently. As a result the user gets more useful information more quickly".

Endeca Information Access and Analysis Solutions
Endeca offers a wide variety of next-generation search, navigation and analysis solutions designed to help organizations maximize the value of content, catalog and enterprise information assets. These solutions give users a simple yet powerful means to explore, discover and interact with information from across multiple applications, file formats and data silos in a way that was never before possible. Endeca's catalog and commerce search offering, Endeca InFront; its enterprise search offering, Endeca ProFind; and its access and analysis offering, Endeca Latitude, share a common platform and a common approach. This combination gives organizations the power to make critical information available to wide audience, give key business users unprecedented control of important applications, and provide IT departments with a flexible, scalable and reliable technology to address some of today's most pressing business problems.

About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Barnes & Noble, The Home Depot, Wal-Mart); financial services (Bank of America, MFS Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book and IHS) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.

About Oculus Info, Inc.
Oculus is the leading provider of innovative business visualization software solutions for the Fortune 500, federal government agencies and third party software companies. The principals at Oculus have been business visualization designers, developers and researchers since 1990. More information: www.oculusinfo.com or info@oculusinfo.com.

Media Contacts
Craig VerColen, Endeca, 617-577-7999, cvercolen@endeca.com
Richard Brath, Oculus, 416-203-3003 x242, rbrath@oculus.com