It partnered with software companies, including SAP, Thomson Reuters, Kx Systems, and One Market Data (OneTick).

The company name is derived from the word panopticon which is an architectural concept originally intended to facilitate surveillance of prisons.

[2] Its Swedish origins are shared with GapMinder, Qliktech and Spotfire, making Sweden a centre for Information Visualization research and development.

The company was founded in 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the emerging markets brokerage Brunswick Direct before being spun off as a separate entity in 2002.

[14] Panopticon is designed to allow analysts to utilize Pre-Attentive Processing to identify anomalies and outliers in large amounts of fast-changing data.

This allows the user to load data, select variables and hierarchical structures, and navigate through the resultant visualization, filtering, zooming and drilling (sometimes called slicing and dicing), to identify outliers, correlations and trends.

[17][18] This support for streaming data with its products has allowed financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase,[19] Citigroup,[20] Citadel, and BlackRock[21] to implement the Panopticon within their real-time trading and risk applications.