By Gary Strader, Senior Consultant
As Bardess specializes in complex data management projects, we deploy various BI tools based on the data challenges we encounter. Here we would like to introduce you to another one of the BI applications we are currently deploying. This product has the potential to present your data in various views that you may have never experienced before.
TIBCO Spotfire is the fastest growing offering in the new breed of business discovery tools. These new products feature greater ease of use, higher user adoption, and more rapid development when compared to the “big stack” BI vendors. Spotfire is unique in this new business discovery landscape. Following is an outline of some of the differentiating features between Spotfire and other business discovery tools.
Business Discovery Experience
Spotfire combines powerful data discovery features with rich data visualization and ease of use. Forrester Research, Inc. recognized the TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Platform as a leader in self-service Business Intelligence (BI) platforms with the highest “Current Offering” score. It’s rated near the top of the “Ease of Use” category in the Gartner Business Intelligence report year after year as well. Here are some of the features that we think makes Spotfire compelling to end users.
- Modern user interface with features such as drag and drop and dynamically resizing charts.
- Advanced chart visualizations such as dynamic trellis charts, 3D scatter plots, and map charts.
- Native iPad support. Build your application once for all client devices.
- Collaborate with other users via marking, tagging, bookmarks and lists.
Exploratory Data Analysis
Spotfire is the best choice among current business discovery tools for performing advanced exploratory data analysis. Spotfire has many built-in features that don’t require a user to be an expert in statistics to discover patterns and trends in their data. For those more advanced users with expertise in statistical packages such as S+ and R, Spotfire has built-in integration to run more advanced algorithms on your data.
- Built-in correlation analysis. Did the release of our marketing campaign correlate to an increase of sales?
- Built-in trend similarity algorithms. This can help group and identify customers that are trending up or down over time.
- Built-in clustering algorithms. For example, marketing customer segmentation.
- S+ and R integration for advanced statistical analysis not included in Spotfire. For example, market basket analysis.
Software Bus
TIBCO is an acronym for “the information bus company”. The company was founded with the philosophy of creating software that communicates via an “information bus”, similar to how computer hardware was designed many years ago to utilize a communication bus. Because of this bus architecture, all of TIBCO’s products are designed from the ground up to interface seamlessly with other TIBCO products. This is a key differentiator between Spotfire and its “pure play” competition. By contract many of the mega-stack vendors have acquired technology over the years, and rebranded it as their own, leaving doubt as to whether the necessary integration has been accomplished. Here are some of the products Spotfire has the ability to integrate with.
- TIBCO Patterns. Enables searching, matching, and linking structure data.
- TIBCO Master Data Management. Empowers business users to ensure customer data is consistent across operational systems.
For more information on TIBCO Spotfire visit our website or contact us to speak with a consultant.
About the Author
Gary Strader is a senior consultant for Bardess Group Ltd. He has been working with various aspects of data management and analysis for over fifteen years. Gary contributes his expertise to Bardess for pre-sales, solution architecture, development, administration and training. He is certified as a developer and administrator in QlikView and TIBCO Spotfire. Gary’s primary focus is finding optimal solutions to solve Bardess customer data problems.
