Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) and Comshare entered into an independent software vendor agreement, allowing Comshare to integrate AVS's OpenViz into its financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting, and financial analysis solutions. OpenViz is a visual intelligence solution for business data users. The addition of OpenViz to Comshare's applications creates new analysis and reporting capabilities and provides an intuitive visual user interface. "We believe the time is right for analysts, knowledge workers, and managers to evolve from passive consumers of static graphics to interacting with images and data in meaningful ways," says Dave King, Comshare's senior vice president of product development and CTO. OpenViz supports Microsoft Common Object Model and JavaBean models, allowing developers to extend commercial and custom-developed Business Intelligence solutions for business-class data visualization. Providing business professionals extensive 2- and 3-D charts, OpenViz supports input of map-related data used in spatial applications. Comshare's OpenViz-enabled applications are expected to be on the market by the end of 1999.