Tibco launches collaborative analytics platform

Tibco Spotfire 4.0 delivers new contextual and social collaboration capabilities that put data insights and findings within relevant business context promising what the company refers to as “free dimensional” data exploration at every level of an organisation.

The new product offers integration with Microsoft SharePoint and tibbr and brings together interactive dashboards, in-context analysis, and rich “social discovery” features to deliver enhanced levels of individual and collective analysis. 

Lars Bauerle, vice president of product strategy at Tibco Spotfire, said the best decisions are always made in context and typically involve a group of people who provide valuable insights:

“With Spotfire 4.0, we did not look at collaboration as a collection of the latest social networking fads, but more as a decision-making process within a business environment. We’ve taken that model and applied the most appropriate collaborative features to enhance data analysis in a way that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd and speeds final decisions,” Bauerle said.

The new collaboration features in Spotfire 4.0 build on existing features, including universal search, collaborative bookmarks, and the ability to share analyses across an organisation. Users can search by keyword and instantly identify all associated data points across the analysis. 

Meanwhile collaborative public bookmarks allow users to capture a dashboard and share that visualisation with others following that dashboard. Users can capture a particular analytic and decision-making approach, and then easily share that analysis via the Web to desktop and iPad users.

The contextual collaboration features include the ability to embed Spotfire analyses within corporate portals, blogs and Microsoft SharePoint. Users can also embed Web pages, such as wikis, and live threaded discussions from social media within a Spotfire analysis to provide easy access to online information that relates to the analysis.

With Spotfire 4.0 users can also actively “follow” an analysis subject or author, create discussion “workspaces” around an insight or decision and invite others to join. It is also possible to embed a discussion thread into an analysis, so users see the discussion that prompted the analysis directly within Spotfire.

“Business users want meaningful insights, not data. They want to see the most relevant information to the business event at hand, as well as the capabilities to socialise the meaning of the data,” said Dan Vesset, vice

president of business analytics at IDC. “The in-context and socialisation capabilities within Spotfire 4.0 are what we see organisations requesting. The ability to ‘place data’ within a specific scenario is what quickly

enables organisations to pinpoint what’s important and what should be acted upon.”