TIBCO Software Inc. has announced TIBCO Spotfire 4.0, the latest version of its analytics platform that combines the clarity of visual data discovery with collaboration capabilities for improved decision-making.
"There are two key themes for 4.0 that we are focusing on. One is reaching a wider community through analytic dashboards and the other is harnessing social platforms to improve contextual collaboration and help our customers collaborate better and make better decisions," Lou Bajuk, senior director of product management, TIBCO Spotfire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Featuring integration with Microsoft SharePoint and tibbr, TIBCO's enterprise social computing platform, Spotfire 4.0 brings together interactive dashboards, in-context analysis, and "social discovery" features to provide improved levels of individual and collective analysis.
On the collaboration side, there are two important aspects to the new release - both contextual and social, enabling people to investigate, share and discuss a wide range of possible actions, says Bajuk. "Spotfire has always been very powerful at helping individuals apply their expertise to data and we see collaboration as a logical extension to that."
By putting analysis in the right business context, individuals and groups can do more meaningful analysis, discover more important insights and make better decisions. Spotfire 4.0 embeds analysis in the context of critical business activity. With Spotfire 4.0 users can easily embed Spotfire analyses within corporate portals, blogs and Microsoft SharePoint, embed web pages, such as wikis, within a Spotfire analysis to provide easy access to online information that relates to the analysis, embed live, threaded discussions from social media, such as tibbr, within a Spotfire analysis, to provide contextual discussions relevant to the decision, and link to Spotfire analyses from other websites or blogs with ease.
Additionally, enhanced by tibbr, Spotfire uses social networking to leverage the insights of distributed teams to develop consensus and drive action. With Spotfire 4.0 users can actively "follow" an analysis subject or author, spontaneously create a new discussion "workspace" around an insight or decision and invite others to join, embed a discussion thread into an analysis, so users see the discussion that prompted the analysis directly within Spotfire, save an analysis to a discussion thread where others can see and discuss it. Discussion participants can simply click to open the analysis within a web browser, access an analysis and be alerted to changes through each member's "channel of choice" including web, text, or mobile, and initiate video conferencing or desktop sharing via a single click to initiate a live "Spotfire Meeting."
"The idea here is that this kind of collaboration around analysis happens all the time informally in organizations now, but it is the walk-down-the-hall-and-talk-to-somebody or send-a-couple-of-emails form of collaboration and that is hard to scale up beyond an office or a time zone."
The second major area of enhancement in 4.0 other than collaboration, is the broad use of analytic dashboards with tailored levels of information and tailored levels of interactivity and navigation, says Bajuk.
Striking a balance between just enough information and just the right interactivity options for particular users enables Spotfire 4.0 to serve a wide range of data analysts and information consumers, according to TIBCO. Users can move seamlessly between data discovery and analytic application creation, consistently employing best practices for data analysis.
The new release offers new designs and visualizations that allow users to quickly see all relevant information at a glance in a single screen, as well as new capabilities to improve the user experience by allowing analysts to tailor flexible, interactive dashboards for information consumers. Spotfire's analytic applications and dashboards can be easily created without programming or IT support and one-click deployment to the web provides easy access to a community of users.
For more information about the new release, visit http://spotfire.tibco.com/4-0.aspx.