IDV Solutions today announced the public release of Retail Analyzer, an interactive mashup of enterprise and publicly available data built on Visual Fusion, Microsoft’s SharePoint, Bing Maps, and Silverlight. Visual Fusion is visual mashup software for the enterprise, a platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of SharePoint.

Retail Analyzer is a demonstration application that visualizes sales performance for fictitious stores and territories across the United States on top of Bing Maps and inside SharePoint. It is built on Visual Fusion 4.5—just released on 10 November—and gives users a rich bevy of functionality to sample. The application's capabilities represent the best of what interactive geospatial mashups can offer:

• heat maps that promote at-a-glance understanding of complex data sets
• an interactive timeline coordinated with the map
• the ability to filter each data layer by time, category, and value ranges
• the ability to add ad hoc Web feeds or search results from Bing, Flickr, and Wikipedia
• spatial query tools that produce business intelligence in the form of a datagrid, an aggregated pie chart, and historical bar graphs; these BI components interact with one another, and modifying the query on the map updates the BI components on the fly

All of these capabilities sit within the world-class user experience that Visual Fusion has become famous for.

“This is one of the most compelling demonstration applications we’ve ever made publicly available,” explained Scott Caulk, Director of Product Management at IDV Solutions. “It was born out of an application we built for the Microsoft Technology Centers, and it mirrors some of the work we do for other customers as well. I think organizations will be excited to see what’s possible with Visual Fusion, SharePoint, and Bing Maps. And the most exciting thing is that they can have this or a similar solution operational in just weeks with Visual Fusion.”

Retail Analyzer follows quickly on the heels of two other Visual Fusion 4.5 public demonstrations, Piracy Watch and Hurricane Watch. Retail Analyzer models a more typical use of Visual Fusion, involving real world scenarios like situational awareness, security management, and retail analysis. Organizations around the world use Visual Fusion in similar ways to unite disparate internal and external data sources into business-focused mashups, executive dashboards, location intelligence applications, interactive maps, and common operational pictures.

About IDV Solutions
IDV Solutions is an enterprise software company committed to helping Global 2000 and government organizations make their information more accessible, understandable, and contextual. Their suite of products, Visual Fusion, forms an enterprise mashup platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of SharePoint. This software empowers everyone in an organization to create interactive, geospatial mashups from unlimited sources of data. It provides a streamlined platform for building Enterprise 2.0 apps that drive agility, collaboration, and insight. For more information visit www.idvsolutions.com.