The mind-power to change the world is what makes an individual worthy to leave their footprint on the list of the most influential entrepreneurs ever. Few leaders around the globe have the ability to transform the industry with their unique ideas and disruptive approach. A geek at heart, technologist Anton Baranchuk, Co-founder & CEO of AnyChart, is one such leader.
In addition to AnyChart, Anton has stirred a string of successful enterprises in various fields of the IT industry: multimedia processing, software protection, location-based technologies, and more. He holds a PhD in math. Anton has been instrumental in unlocking the success doors for the company since its inception in 2003, with the vision that “Team is everything.”
AnyChart and its Innovative Services
AnyChart is a company offering universal, versatile interactive data visualization and business graphics solutions. As the name ‘AnyChart’ implies, its products allow you to create any chart and business graphics out of any data, perfectly suitable for any web projects in any browser and on any platform. Under Anton’s leadership, the company prominently delivers a powerful HTML5/JavaScript charting engine that is marketed as a product family comprising four JS libraries, each inherently optimized to serve a specific dataviz purpose:
AnyChart — For basic charts (over 70 chart types are available out-of-the-box).
AnyMap — For maps and seat charts.
AnyStock — For charting stock, financial, and any other date/time based data.
AnyGantt — For resource, project Gantt diagrams, and PERT charts.
Getting new features on no less than four major updates throughout a year, these solutions make all aspects of charting easy for its customers. With a flexible licensing model, AnyChart offers everyone to choose the best options depending on their specific needs, perfectly fitting any companies and projects, from pre-revenue startups and simple websites to corporate apps, SaaS, and OEM.
“For educational and other nonprofit use, AnyChart offers a free license,” says Anton. Apart from this, his sheer determination helped the company in establishing its own graphics engine and then making it open-source in 2016. This graphics engine was published on GitHub under the name of GraphicsJS — a lightweight SVG/VML-based JavaScript library with intuitive API. It lets developers easily draw any HTML5 graphics and animation and is absolutely free.
Anton’s constant efforts resulted in framing AnyChart amongst the global leaders of data visualization tools.
Leading with Compassion
Being the leading light of AnyChart, Anton asserts: “I believe maybe the most important thing is openness, in the widest sense. To your teammates. To your customers. To new ideas, experiences, and information in general. Then, analyze what you’ve learned or thought about and think how it can actually be applied in what you are doing, and not only for now but also for later stages.”
Staying Ahead of the Curve
Back in 2003, recognizing that any data can be converted into XML and then get smoothly visualized with the help of Adobe Flash-based charts, Anton set the foundation of AnyChart. At that time, both Flash and XML were on the rise. But also, those technologies were still young, so the company had to deal with number of inherent bugs, security shortcomings, and some other issues. “The key to success appeared to be large partnerships that we managed to launch right away,” says Anton.
“When Oracle introduced our data visualization component in APEX, we started getting a whole lot of feedback from users, which greatly helped us in shaping our product development, support, and business strategies and tactics to the best possible extent. So I can say it was essentially important for us as a tech business to quickly roll out a product and earn our first big clients,” he adds.
The voyage to create a niche was not an easy task as there was a downfall of Flash seen in the some years later. Embracing HTML5 as the next universal web technology, Anton’s AnyChart created a brand new charting solution, almost from scratch, and provided full support of both Flash and HTML5-based components. Adding the SVG support, AnyChart released JS chart libraries under its umbrella, which have been named the best in JavaScript this year.
Acknowledging what its team did to get where it is currently positioned, Anton proudly asserts “I am happy we’ve done it with such a success and are among the global leaders in interactive data visualization nowadays.”
“It is crucial for a technology company to stay in the know of what’s going on out there, predict any possible changes that can affect it, follow the trends, and of course, always do your best to fully satisfy the needs of your clients at all times,” he added further.
Embracing the Technology and Innovation
Anton believes that in this fast paced industry it has become essential for the technologists to keep up with the tech-enabled trends. Emphasizing upon AnyChart’s distinctiveness in the market, he asserts, “Due to a big number of ideas and solutions out there in almost every single field, it is important to properly analyze everything and see what’s going to work best in each particular case.”
Recommending a Never Give Up Attitude
Anton advises aspiring tech enthusiasts to analyze the overall market and think several steps ahead to withstand the complexities. But most significantly, he believes in order to experience a principle work-ethical environment, a professional and enthusiastic team really matters. Addressing a proverb saying “Fall seven times and stand up eight,” Anton asserts: “Don’t give up if something goes worse than expected and in case of any failures.”
A Bright Future
With thousands of happy customers — from startups to corporate giants like Microsoft, Ford, Samsung, Bosch, Citi, Merck, GE, Juniper, and many others, Anton’s future plans are about working more and more to make AnyChart’s data visualization solutions even better to further justify the trust of the customers.
URL: www.anychart.com
Source: The 30 Most Influential Business Leaders in Tech 2018
