Anacubis Desktop is a Competitive Intelligence set of tools and comes from the i2 Group that initially created similar (but more comprehensive), software for Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analysts. The role in both cases is to show the relationships between data as visual representations. As Business Geographers, we thoroughly understand that a picture is worth a thousand words. A thematic or dot density map can show things that the tabular data just can’t. This product does the same thing, only uses icons, colored lines (e.g. red for competitor) and iconic filters to let the user visualize the relationships in data. This might be sourced from industry information from Hoovers.com, patent information (as an intellectual property visualization), data from subscription services like LexisNexis, D&B or your own Excel spreadsheet. You can even see relationship from Google or Amazon searches. Not only will it show the commonality in data, but also in people, such as common inventors among patents and perhaps even the commonality among members of boards of directors.

The Interface
The interface is not that different from most mapping programs. The center window is for the relationship map, the window on the left is for attributes, (attributes of the icons in the relationship map,) and the bottom window is for the database used in the relationship map. The task pane (window) on the right is for the most commonly used tasks, and it can identify some of the product add-ons, such as the intellectual property add-on.

There are all the standard zoom, pan and symbology changing tools that you would expect in any program that represents data graphically.

This software is designed to follow the Competitive Intelligence process:

• Identify the issue
• Gather the available information (intelligence)
• Analyze
• Disseminate the analysis
• Provide the tools for an action plan.

Features

• Draw from online data sources, in-house or subscription data sources
• Visualize competitors between companies
• Show the patents that companies hold
• See gross revenue and revenue of competitors
• See a company and its’ subsidiaries
• Filter so you see only those relationships that are important to your analysis
• See what products and services a company has
• Re-organize relationships to simplify or clarify them
• Access data sources on the web from within the product and the relationships visualized
• Show where future businesses are in the business world
• Show relationships between things other than businesses, e.g. products, people, and patents
• Show ownership between people and companies (company holdings)

• What are “they” doing?
• How successful are “they” and why?
• Who are “their” key players?
• What is “their” financial strength?
• What technology, intellectual property or patents do “they” hold?
• How are “they” positioned in the industry?
• What trends can we identify?
• What relationships are key with the competition?
• What changes internally do “they” have that may change the SWOT analysis?

Typical scenarios

Competition: “Your competitor is linking with your distributors, but which ones?”

Mergers and Acquisitions: “We are thinking about buying XYZ corporation, how would that effect us in terms of…?”

Risk management: “What sort of conflicts of interests might we have if we go for a joint venture with…., and who is this guy in their management team and how about all those lawsuits filed against him?”

Know Your Customer: “Who else are they linked to and can we capitalize on that relationship?”

Visual Examples

Example 1: The first visual example is an .mpg file (1.07 MB) that shows the operation of the software. If this software has a fault, it is that is makes the creation of relationships appear too easy. This .mpg file is at 320 X 240 because of the file size. Don’t worry too much about what specifically the software is doing (which company, what analysis, etc.), just notice how quickly the relationships are created and how fast they can be reconfigured. Click here for the mpg file.

Example 2: This is an example of a competitive relationship for Exxon-Mobile.

The relationship map of Exxon-Mobile and some of the companies they compete against is overwhelming to understand. Because this is so vast, it needs to be filtered. This is very simple to do either via selection in the data window or through built-in filters.

Example 3: This next image is the same data only limited to a selection of major US competitors.

The attributes of Exxon-Mobile can be seen on the left. The annual revenue of Exxon’s’ competitors can be seen on this map as well. This data is from Hoovers.

A series of built-in filters assist in the analysis. Here are the filter Icons and what they do. When you select one of these filters, the relationship map highlights those entities, just like in a mapping program.

Link (symbology) can be changed, too. Below is the user interface for changing link symbology. It is very similar to most mapping products.

Example 4: This is an example of Patents, showing the inventors, derivative patents and which companies are using the patent. Patents work the same way as the competitors examples above, so data is quickly reduced to something useable, assessable, and with other analysis, something actionable. What this also shows is that product DE 10055625 is related to other peripheral (or related) products and the inventors Back Friedrich and Duerre Markus.

Example 5: Harrison’s Cafe. This example is a hypothetical relationship map and data using Starbucks data from Hoovers, and combining it with data created inside the software. So if you have internal data, there are several ways to get it into the software. Note that the filter selection automatically adjusted to the types of data available.

The easiest way to get data into the software is by “drag and drop”. This works with external data links, e.g. Hoovers, LexisNexis, D&B or your own Excel spreadsheets. It is very cool to simply drag and drop a complex relationship with all the related data from the internal (to the software) Hoovers’ web site and see it appear in the software. All of the usual cut and paste functions work as well. In the data window, selection can be made and then those subsets of the larger data can be seen in the relationship map window. In a manner similar to Excel workbooks, the original data, and select sets, will appear as tabs at the bottom of the primary window. You can even add memos to the attributes. We could not find any ODBC connectivity to external databases.

Conclusion
Anacubis Desktop is quite sophisticated and very easy to use. The creation of relationships is so easy that it disguises the complexity of the process. While creating this review, I asked my co-author, Harrison, who is 15 and not into business software (except for Excel and Word), to explore the functionality. He treated it like a game and was up and running in probably half an hour, making me screen shots within less than five minutes of me walking him through it. I think that is a tribute to how intuitive it is – even to someone whose expertise in not in Competitive Intelligence. He created Example 5 with both real (Starbucks) data and faux data from Harrison’s Café and Katie’s Anime Store.

If you are involved in figuring out what the competition is doing or might do, market research, acquisitions and mergers, or risk assessment, it would be wise to look into this product. I have no idea how you would create this kind of visualization on your own. Probably you would end up trying to do this with a bunch of database queries, and then creating the relationship graphics in Visio. The Anacubis solution creates professional output and great visual understanding of disparate data.