TIBCO Spotfire 3.1 Makes Predictive Analytics Available for All Business Apps

TIBCO Software (Somerville, Mass.) has launched TIBCO Spotfire 3.1, the latest version of its in-memory analytics platform, making statistically rigorous predictive analytics accessible within Spotfire's visual user experience. According to the vendor, Spotfire 3.1 responds faster than business intelligence (BI) and more flexibly than spreadsheets, equipping all users within the enterprise with the ability to easily analyze complex data, customize their discovery experience and share their results through mashups, portals or interactive dashboards. With this release, the vendor asserts, TIBCO makes predictive analytics a mainstream feature of any business application, allowing any enterprise decision-maker to perform "what-if" scenario testing on demand and find new insights in complex data instantly.

"The TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Platform continues to evolve, putting more power into the hands of our analytics team and allowing us to cut time to decision, while guiding our users to more strategic insights," comments Ramona Hovey, senior vice president, products and services, DrillingInfo Inc., an Austin, Texas-based information and data analysis service for the oil and gas industry whose clients include major oil companies and large and small independents that produce over 90% of all U.S. oil and gas. "By exploiting innovative Spotfire technologies, such as Web-based business analytics, we are looking to build highly responsive, real-time business models to provide our internal and external clients with accelerated business innovation, growth, and collaboration."

"If empowering business users to make better decisions is the end game of BI and analytics technology, then organizations " and vendors " must provide functionality that goes beyond basic information access," says Dan Vesset, vice president, business analytics, IDC (Framingham, Mass). "Support for scenario evaluation, predictive analytics, collaboration, and guided analytics of tools such as TIBCO Spotfire enables business decision makers at any level to discover new and actionable insights while proactively detecting and responding to events. This ability not only improves productivity, but also minimizes IT investment."

TIBCO Spotfire 3.1 adds new tools to the solution's visual data exploration and analysis solution, giving users more ways more to explore, interact with, and present their data, while giving them more flexibility and speed to analyze their data, according to a TIBCO news release. Unlike traditional BI or static spreadsheets, Spotfire 3.1 also includes conditional coloring and lasso and axis marking that allow for better data analysis of patterns, clusters and correlations among sets of variables, TIBCO claims. Its multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots also allow for enhanced analysis of unstructured, 'free-dimensional' data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

Working in tandem with TIBCO Spotfire Application Data Services , Spotfire 3.1 also makes it possible to analyze data from various enterprise data sources, including SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications, and the Oracle E-Business Suite, the vendor claims. This simplified integration " coupled with new Web mashup application programming interfaces (APIs) " enables richer and pervasive analytic application development, according to TIBCO. By bringing the power of analytics to mission-critical functions such as sales and marketing, finance, research & development, and supply chain, Spotfire 3.1 allows IT to continually respond more quickly to growing business needs. With Spotfire, the limitations that had often led IT to adopt multiple applications in order to satisfy the information needs of different user groups no longer apply, TIBCO says.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio