A few years ago, especially in the web world, most visualizations were dull image-based charts. Everyone was using Excel for their charting, which was boring to death and there had been always a need for better look and feel, which could help one to attract and impress users. That’s why today, incorporating complete data visualization components in business applications has become a mandatory requirement, which can add both meaning and glamour to the the application.

Kolkata based FusionCharts is one such company which spotted the opportunity in this space very early and came up with what has been the industry’s leading solution ever since. The company was incorporated in 2005 by Pallav Nadhani, co-founder and CTO and Kisor Nadhani, co-founder and Director, make data visualization components (charts, gauges, maps and more) for web and desktop applications. “Our products can be used anywhere where there is data – reports, dashboards, polls, surveys, monitoring tools and the like. The components we make are technology- and platform- agnostic and the best part about them is they are animated, interactive and have that wow factor about them,” says Pallav Nadhani.

Technically speaking, data visualization is representing data in the form of graphical elements like column charts, line charts, pie charts and the like. The reason behind this is that the human eye is much more accustomed to figuring out trends and relations from graphical elements than when it sees them just as a bunch of numbers. Particularly when data sets get larger, identifying relations among them and coming to actionable information becomes all the more difficult. Hence, data visualization has gained mass adoption among web and business users.

“Most business applications today contain a reporting module and our name being synonymous with Flash charting, the companies working on the applications naturally come to us. Most of our other competitors, being either small or new can’t provide the same levels of product literature and customer support that we do,” explains Pallav. The company also offers a completely free and open source version of their solutions as well. People pick up this component, build wrappers around it, and deploy it in their open source offerings. “This gives us a lot of mileage and helps us build a community around the product,” claims Pallav.

FusionCharts has adopted a conventional business model of selling licenses of their component to individuals and enterprises for use in their websites and business applications. For individuals who wish to use it for simple websites of theirs, it is a simple one-time cost but for businesses, which need to integrate it in their products and then re-sell it, they have annual charges as well which keeps an assured revenue stream coming in. Interestingly the company doesn’t charge for any upgrades which has pleasantly surprised their customers many a times. “Our targeted customers are right from one-man ISVs to enterprises including Fortune 500 companies. After all, everyone has data in their applications, and they need data visualization components for the reporting,” says Pallav.