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. It later was acquired by the UK based Hamsard Group (Hamsard is now known as Cantono Plc), and became a subsidiary of the Group. In March 2007 its competitor
Spotfire undertook negotiations with Hamsard Group, to take full ownership of Panopticon. This potential deal was not completed, Spotfire pulling out of negotiations, and itself subsequently being purchased by
Tibco. In May 2007 the company was sold back to its founders as part of a management buyout. In May 2012, the company announced that
QlikTech had partnered with Panopticon to enable
QlikTech clients to embed Panopticon data visualizations into their QlikView dashboards. Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data. In June 2012, the company announced that
SAP was utilizing its Panopticon data visualization tools as the front end for real-time deployments of the
SAP HANA in-memory appliance. In April 2013, Panopticon was selected for inclusion in UBM Tech Channel's CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. The Big Data 100 recognizes innovative technology vendors that help businesses manage "Big Data"—the rapidly increasing volume, variety and velocity of information being generated today. The list covers three categories: business analytics, data management, infrastructure and services. The Big Data 100 includes many established vendors as well as startups and specialized suppliers of niche products that help businesses address Big Data needs. In April 2013, Panopticon was named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in the Cool Vendors for In-Memory Computing 2013 report by Gartner, Inc. The April 23, 2013 report was co-authored by Roy Schulte, Roxane Edjlali, et al. This is the first year that Gartner has called out In-Memory Computing specifically as a subject for one of its Cool Vendor reports. In August 2013, Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) announced that it had completed its acquisition of Panopticon Software AB. In December 2018, Altair Engineering Inc (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced that it had completed its acquisition of Datawatch Corporation. ==Pre-attentive processing==