TIBCO rolls out Spotfire 3.1 with spotlight on predictive analytics

In a move to mainstream predictive analytics, TIBCO Software today rolled out the latest version of its Spotfire platform.

Dubbed Spotfire 3.1, the latest iteration promises a natural language statistical experience. Spotfire 3.1 aims to help anyone in an organization get fact-based answers to questions that help drive revenue.

The company says its software is not just for analytics gurus but also marketing professionals, business development managers and others who need forward-looking business intelligence in a hurry. [TIBCO Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, which for the most part aggregate historical trends only, Spotfire 3.1 projects them forward with what-if scenarios," says Mark Lorion, vice president of marketing for TIBCO Spotfire. "Anyone in the company can ask questions on demand and our analytics will provide future predictions based on behind-the-scenes data-driven methods. Users don't have to understand the methods. They just have to ask the questions – and they get answers instantly rather than waiting days like you would with today's business intelligence (BI) tools."

Spotfire 3.1 in action

Let’s say you’re trying to promote a new product in the consumer goods market. Spotfire 3.1 lets you choose input variables based on what you suspect might be driving the advertisement response, such as price, discounts, packaged offers, age of the respondent or length of time as a customer. You would then press a button that asks, "Are these related?"

After you push that button, Spotfire 3.1 works behind the scenes to run predictive models, using analytics and statistics to compile sensitivity analysis and correlations, then return a colorful graph that shows the response rate and which factors are most closely correlated to people clicking on your advertisement.

The software's multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, ‘free-dimensional’ data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

While BI gives you historical data, the predictive analytics aspect of Spotfire 3.1 offers insights into what could happen next time you run a similar promotion. It can also help you fine-tune your promotions by targeting the customers that clicked on your ad, or offering different promotions to different audiences – and it does it almost instantly.

Unlike traditional BI or static spreadsheets, Lorion says 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. The software's multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, "free-dimensional" data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

“IT organization and statistician groups aren’t able to respond quickly enough to the many questions that arise from business users, so they go to their gut,” Lorion says. “Spotfire lets you make fact-based decisions rather than gut-based decisions.”

Predictive analytics challenges

Of course, predictive analytics software is not a new concept, and Lorion admits that the predictions are only as good as the quality and breadth of the available data. But predictive analytics is gaining momentum in the enterprise marketplace.

The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it

IBM bought predictive analytics firm SPSS last July for $1.2 billion. And IDC predicts the $1.4 billion market for advanced analytics, of which predictive analytics is a subset, will grow 10 percent annually through 2011. Despite tight IT budgets, Lorion is optimistic about the space and the company’s offering.

“The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it,” Lorion says. “Companies don’t want to hire PhDs to make sense of their statistics. But we need to drive awareness of our product and educate the market that the power of predictive analytics isn’t in the hands of only a couple of statisticians.”

Spotfire 3.1 works in tandem with Spotfire Application Data Services to let companies analyze data from various sources, including SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications, and the Oracle E-Business Suite.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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TIBCO Spotfire 3.0's features bring strategists closer to real-time human-from-data decision-making

If the last six months have proven anything to business strategists, it's that corporate agility is not just a "nice to have." Being able to adjust massively complex businesses at the drop of a market index is clearly imperative.

But just how to act when the signs point to the need for rapid adjustment? Quality -- not necessarily quantity -- determines the winning response to unanticipated market and economic shifts.

So TIBCO Software's release today of Spotfire 3.0, the visualization analytics solution, comes at a great time. The platform's new features are designed to significantly improve integration of the structured data sets to be analyzed and viewed, improve how developers build analytics applications, and scales in terms of volume and speed to the demands of global companies. [Disclosure: TIBCO is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Spotfire 3.0 lets uses expand Spotfire applications into additional business areas, and also allows new classes of users to tap the Spotfire data visualization experience, says the company. The integration benefits include simplified connectivity to SAP, Oracle, Siebel, and Salesforce.com business applications data. Spotfire 3.0 works in tandem with TIBCO Spotfire Application Data Services to bring the data assets from these business applications into the visualization and distribution process.

The types of data views Spotfire produces augment, but don't replace traditional business intelligence (BI) values. Furthermore, these easily customized data visualization applications can be used by many kinds of workers -- or via the web by customers and partners -- whereas BI usually requires the intermediaries of seasoned SQL or other query tools analysts. You'll need and want to be able to do both BI and ad hoc data visualizations.

More and better data put into easily and quickly accessed and understood produces a value that has never been more important. Quick and ubiquitous access to the fruits of data assimilation and analysis (with proper enterprise-class security and access control) not only helps companies and leaders make good decisions, it helps validate and adjust those decisions in near real-time. Nowadays, it's not enough to have a good bead on a strategy or shift, you need to have the convincing data available to prove and re-prove the actions and strategy. And then repeat.

The latest Spotfire release comes on the heels of last year's improvements in mashups support, real-time data and business process integration, new visualization methods and predictive analytics. These have helped companies leverage their investments in complex event processing (CEP) capabilities and enterprise service buses (ESBs). I wouldn't be surprised to see some ability to leverage the Spotfire analytics in the context of business process modeling (BPM) at some point in the future.

So far the visualization benefits of Spotfire apply to structured data, but bringing a richer mix into the visualization landscape can be done via third parties and various data and content assimilation methods. Bringing more content into the process will, of course, grown more important over time, especially as we enter the cloud era -- with valued data and information available from more sources in more formats.

Indeed, the newest Spotfire includes a Web services connector to tap many additional applications and data sources. "An integrated caching layer also dramatically speeds up data access from slow data sources by pre-loading common views and eliminating or reducing the need to create data warehouses or data marts," says TIBCO.

TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 is available now. For more information http://spotfire.tibco.com/Products/Whatsnew-Spotfire.aspx.