Sun Microsystems boosts quality, performance with visual analysis software.

The Hive Group, a provider of visual analysis software for enterprise asset management (EAM), recently announced that Sun Microsystems, Inc., a leading provider of hardware, software and services that make the Net work, has deployed Hive's Honeycomb 4 for visual analysis. Honeycomb allows Sun managers to transform thick business intelligence reports that contain the equivalent of thousands of spreadsheet records into a single, interactive digital map. The instant insight provided through Honeycomb powers many of Sun's global quality and marketing initiatives, including a recent effort to learn the big issues faced by Sun customers through a worldwide survey of 65,000 individuals.

The key innovation behind Honeycomb is a technique called treemapping. Originally developed in 1991 by University of Maryland professor Dr. Ben Shneiderman--a long-time advisor to The Hive Group--treemaps are a space-filling visualization method of representing large collections of quantitative data, achieving this by collapsing a hierarchy into color-coded rectangles on a computer screen. The location, size, and color of each rectangle represent attributes of the data being viewed. Selecting a rectangle provides details. Creating treemaps with Honeycomb's patent-pending technology takes only minutes, saving Sun managers countless hours of sifting through reports.

Sun has taken advantage of the rapid creation features in Honeycomb to create what they've come to call 'Heatmaps' for EAM, measuring everything from supplier performance to product quality to customer satisfaction in the quest for optimum business output. Says Fraser Arnot, the architect of the first Honeycomb treemaps at Sun: "We quickly realized that this application's key attribute was the ability to identify the critical few from the trivial many, which in today's business world is becoming harder and harder to do. In addition, we were surprised that we could use it in so many areas of the business."

Sun originally embraced Honeycomb in January of 2002 when it sought a visual tool for encapsulating the data generated through SunTRAQ, a corporate knowledge management initiative designed to gather and combine data from suppliers, manufacturing, installations, sales, etc. The infrastructure for SunTRAQ was built around Sun's corporate business intelligence platform. Honeycomb was added to create an executive reporting tool that could visually summarize massive amounts of information.

In one recent extreme case, Sun's marketing development organization used Honeycomb to get a handle on what appeared to be an unmanageable data set. A survey of tens of thousands of individuals across the global Sun customer base yielded more than 65,000 responses. The surveys aimed to give Sun both a deep and broad understanding of the issues its customers face. But with 65,000 responses there was far too much data to create a meaningful summary through traditional means. The team turned to Honeycomb and within a day produced a treemap capable of summarizing all the data but also drilling down on any issue or any customer.

"Honeycomb delivers instant insight," continued Arnot. "Its ability to organize, highlight and sort data at multiple levels makes Honeycomb unique in converting raw data into meaningful information. Ultimately it's the fact that it presents a simple picture of often complex data that makes the application so powerful."

"Sun's experience with treemaps is a powerful example of the benefits of visual analysis," said Tony Jewitt, CEO of The Hive Group. "Data can be overwhelming. A spreadsheet can get so long you become paralyzed looking at it, taking the journey to insight down a long, arduous road instead of a straight and narrow path. Sun has proven with Honeycomb that when insight becomes instant, only better business results can follow."