Tibco Spotfire Makes Analytics Accessible

According to Mark Lorion, Tibco Spotfire vice president of marketing, the challenge with most business intelligence applications today is that low-end systems are little more than glorified report writers, while the applications that are powerful enough to truly do analytics are not accessible to anyone except for a few expensive specialists that have mastered the nuances of those systems.

Version 3.1 of Tibco Spotfire makes it simple for end users to interactively discover information using custom dashboards that will configure themselves around any data that the end user wants to analyze, he said.  The Tibco Spotfire applications, which supports both S+ and R programming languages for creating statistical analysis applications, eliminate much of the need for end user training, said Lorion.

There is a race between all the providers of BI application software to deliver powerful analytics inside a suite of BI applications, which is one of the reasons that IBM bought both SPSS and Cognos. The challenge facing these vendors is getting support for deploying their applications inside both the IT organizations and the business community as a whole. With this latest release, Tibco Spotfire, said Lorien, plans to bridge those two constituencies by reducing the amount of end user support that the IT organization needs to provide when deploying analytic applications, while simultaneously giving business users a tool that allows them to easily do their own modeling of various business scenarios.