Siemens AG

Visual analytics (VA) system development started in academic re-search institutions where novel visualization techniques and open source toolkits were developed. Simultaneously, small software companies, sometimes spin-offs from academic research institu-tions, built solutions for specific application domains. In recent years we observed the following trend: some small VA companies grew exponentially; at the same time some big software vendors such as IBM and SAP started to acquire successful VA compa-nies and integrated the acquired VA components into their existing frameworks. Generally the application domains of VA systems have broadened substantially. This phenomenon is driven by the genera-tion of more and more data of high volume and complexity, which leads to an increasing demand for VA solutions from many applica-tion domains. In this paper we survey a selection of state-of-the-art commercial VA frameworks, complementary to an existing survey on open source VA tools. From the survey results we identify sev-eral improvement opportunities as future research directions