Tibco is trying a new approach to Business Intelligence that could mark the start of a whole new way of marketing business services so that individuals can access the same benefits as businesses.
The launch of Silver Spotfire is, at one level at least, something of an amalgam. It is based on the long-standing Spotfire business intelligence system, which started life in Sweden in 1996 with IVEE Development, and was acquired by Tibco in 2007. Now a cloud-based front end version of this is being run on Silver, which Tibco claims is the first cloud application delivery platform for the enterprise.
The company describes it as a `fully functional on-demand offering designed to enable anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports for business analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.’
The use of the word `anyone’ is important here as its primary objective is to enable visual analytics and interactive dashboards to be created and published to the cloud in minutes without requiring setup or infrastructure. This makes it what the company calls `social BI’ that anyone can use with relative ease. In practice, the company is really targeting business teams within companies where there is a need to build and share reports, dashboards, charts and other visualisations of calculations.
In this context, of course, the essential pre-requisite of direct access to data and a Spotfire BI engine can be taken for granted. But as the notion of `business teams’ now includes an increasing number of home workers and a growing number of self-employed contract staff, the reality of `anyone’ using it is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
As a marketing teaser Tibco is making Silver Spotfire available free to users for the first year, which includes an authoring client and web-based hosting and sharing services for the user’s personal or business Spotfire application.
Spotfire can work with a wide range of data sources, from flat files through to unified data warehouses, and can retrieve data from anything for which a JDBC driver exists or can be written. It does not require any data to be reformatted before processing in the Spotfire server. This means, according to Rock Gnatovich, Spotfire Chief Operating Officer in Tibco, that users can just as readily work on sales and marketing reviews as they can on personal stock portfolios or analysing fantasy sports teams.
This last observation may seem fanciful but one of the markets Tibco is target is the cloud service providers. Using Silver Spotfire it sees these businesses show-casing and exchanging solutions and applications templates with customers and members of communities of common interest. An added service they might consider is a set of routines that business execs might need, such as analysing personal stock portfolios. That would be useful to the users – and sticky for the service providers in service provision terms.
That could even become the future busy executive’s equivalent of Windows Solitaire. And let us not forget that Solitaire was one of the best product marketing teasers ever invented – and still is for many busy executives.
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