In addition to helping organizations make their unstructured-data troves searchable, Lucidworks Inc. now wants to provide the tools for visualizing them.

The company set its plan in motion today by acquiring Twigkit Ltd, a British provider of dashboarding software that boasts clients such as General Electric Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Thomson Reuters Corp. Its product lineup consists of seven integrated development modules that provide the ability to build a customized visual frontend for interacting with a dataset.

A car maker such as Toyota, for instance, could employ Twigkit’s toolkit to aggregate technical documents from its various systems in a central portal where they may be easily accessed by engineers. Analytics teams in turn can use the software for various business intelligence activities. The company said its modules provide the ability to create a wide variety of graphs ranging from standard bar charts to heat maps depicting complex geospatial information.

Moreover, Twigkit provides the ability to do so with considerably less effort than traditional data visualization products. Grant Ingersoll, the chief technology officer of Lucidworks, indicated in a blog post that the toolkit’s ease of use was one of the main motivations behind the acquisition. He highlighted how the software enabled his team to build a financial news application with Thomson Reports in four days when previous attempts took three weeks.

Another big advantage of the Twigkit software is that it can handle data managed by Lucidworks’ Fusion search platform, which should help the acquisition go smoothly from a technical standpoint. Igersoll wrote that his company will work to “more tightly integrate the two applications together” and add new features over the coming months. Twigkit Chief Executive Stefan Olafsson is joining Lucidworks as chief strategy officer to help with the effort, along with Chief Technology Officer Bjarki Holm, who will assume the title of vice president of solutions.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: Twigkit