The tools are part of a bigger market made up of products that provide new ways of seeing data. Other offerings include geographic information systems (GIS) and real-time data-stream-processing visualization tools such as those from StreamBase Systems Inc. and RiverGlass Inc.

"Visualization is a means of making sense of these vast amounts of data," says Dan Vesset, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. "The visualization makes [data] easier, simpler and faster to understand." IDC estimates that sales of data visualization tools were US$250 million in 2005. The market research firm also projects 10 percent annual growth for the $15 billion BI and analytics market, which includes dashboards and applications, along with data visualization tools.

However, Gartner Inc. analyst Bill Hostmann cautions that data visualization is far from a requirement for BI systems, although BI systems that offer visualization capabilities are popular in industries such as pharmaceutical development and petroleum exploration.

Vendors that are hard at work developing data visualization products include Advizor Solutions Inc., Antarctica Systems Inc., Panopticon Software AB, Spotfire and Tableau Software Inc. BI stalwart Cognos Inc. just bundled its Visualizer product into Cognos 8, while Business Objects SA acquired visualization toolmaker Infommersion Inc. in November. These companies and others are also partnering with GIS vendors, notably Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. (ESRI) and MapInfo Corp.

Cullen/Frost, a $10 billion financial holding company in San Antonio, is using the Cognos 8 visualization tools for tracking plans vs. performance. "Before visualization tools, we reviewed paper reports of pertinent data, discussed the reports and then did additional manual analysis through requests to other departments," says Louis Barton, director of data warehouse and BI.