Spotfire Analytics

Reference Code: TA001359BIN Publication Date: January 2008 Author: Richard Edwards

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform Published 01/2008

Butler Group. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 1

TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform TIBCO

BUTLER GROUP VIEW

ABSTRACT

The TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is a Business Intelligence (BI) solution conceived with the typical information worker in mind rather than just the professional business analyst. Every day, millions of individuals within large organisations make small, yet important business decisions based on their experience and whatever information happens to be available at the time. With little time to spare, these decisions are often taken with an incomplete view of the situation, as 'good information' is all too often still difficult to find. Faced with a backlog for new enterprise reports, out-of-control 'spreadsheet marts', and a plethora of custom applications all trying to accomplish similar goals, CIOs and business managers alike need to consider a new approach. Indeed, with most existing BI solutions optimised for the 'known', it makes a refreshing change to come across an offering that tackles the number-one business problem, i.e. the unknown. Acquired by TIBCO Software in May 2007, the challenge now faced by the company is that of a new-comer to the BI battleground. TIBCO's focus on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Business Optimisation, offers a promising route to market for this analytics platform.

KEY FINDINGS

Part of a strong portfolio of products and technologies.

Supports the concept of 'BI for the masses', thus empowering the workforce.

The TIBCO brand is not one that is readily associated with BI solutions.

Time-based reporting not yet offered out-of-the-box at the User Interface level.

Provides some very useful built-in collaboration facilities.

The acquisition of Spotfire adds diversity to TIBCO's product portfolio.

LOOK AHEAD

The market for TIBCO's products and services especially the BI market is extremely competitive, continually evolving, and is subject to rapid change. The initial success of Spotfire will be linked very much to TIBCO's ability to introduce this offering into existing accounts.

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FUNCTIONALITY

Both public and private sector organisations have become highly proficient at capturing large volumes of data, with the capability to hold information about every customer that has ever transacted business with them, or every citizen that resides within their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, however, the good news for many organisations ends there, as although they have been working diligently at collecting information and building up terabytes of stored data across a variety of operational systems and databases, the one vital thing that they have failed to improve upon is the ability to make more effective use of this data.

Product Analysis

Without exception, all organisations need to become more efficient in the way that they exploit their information and data assets. However, the problems associated with the way in which large (and small) organisations utilise their corporate data and information are very deep-seated, and the resolutions that need to be applied are far more fundamental than can be achieved by simply buying more Business Intelligence (BI) products. A change of emphasis is needed in Butler Group's opinion, in that no longer should BI be the consideration for the few, but that BI should be made available to the many.

In Butler Group's view, the BI market is only just reenergising after several years of stagnation. BI vendors have struggled to address some of the key user requirements of a rapidly changing market, electing instead to focus on building market share, acquiring and integrating complementary and ancillary products, and building-out end-to-end suites and platforms in a faux BI arms-race. But, whilst doing all of this, vendors appear to have misjudged the way that companies and institutions want to use these kinds of products; and so it is this fundamental mismatch that is now holding back organisations from working smarter with the data and information assets that they hold.

And so it is Butler Group's contention that BI has reached a crossroads, as while there is no doubt that there are a number of genuinely strong BI solutions on the market today, these continue to be deployed in a limited and therefore purely tactical level. Until such solutions are deployed in a broad fashion and a strategic manner, the true business value of BI technology will remain constrained.

Three years ago the BI industry was attempting to play on the business need for Integrated Business Intelligence (IBI), but in Butler Group's opinion that approach failed to deliver on its promise, and so nothing much really changed. Today, organisations live or die based on their adaptability, and so BI vendors must recognise the need for a solution-set that is affordable enough for mass deployment, scalable enough to support growing data volumes, adaptable enough to cope with ever-changing business demands, and usable enough to avoid becoming so-called 'shelf-ware'.

The ethos behind the TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is that it allows organisations to equip every employee to quickly discover new insights in the information that they work with everyday. Described by the company as a "next generation BI solution", it focuses on something TIBCO calls the "information insight gap", i.e. a mismatch between what business users require and what typical enterprise information architectures are optimised to deliver.

In reality, there is no such thing as a true multi-purpose BI suite, and so adopting BI functionality to meet business requirements still involves a great deal of time and effort from the organisation's IT department. Because the average IT department cannot meet the needs of all business functions and their users, information workers tend to take action into their own hands; building complex spreadsheet models or stand-alone databases in order to make sense out of chaos.

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Figure 1: TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform

Source: TIBCO D A T A M O N I T O R

Although the spreadsheet is a very powerful analytical tool in the hands of a trained professional, the benefit flow tends to be a one-way street, with lots of corporate data and information from line-of-business and transactional systems being fed in, but nothing ever really being fed back out again. And so any insight or intelligence that the business user gains while interpreting these models almost always stays with the user, i.e. the opportunity for organisational learning or process improvement is almost always lost. 'Spreadsheet-sprawl' is a clear sign that an organisation is suffering from an "information insight gap", and so a relatively easy way to determine the extent of the rot is to perform an inventory of all spreadsheets within the organisation. Indeed, Butler Group would even go so far as to suggest that this be considered an essential part of any corporate governance initiative.

The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform offers organisations a different path to take in terms of end user-centric BI. It offers a solid, if not yet extensive, range of functionality, and is constructed atop an architecture that offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of solutions and deployment options. The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is well placed to deliver value across all industries and it is already in use by over 1,000 organisations. It is offered to the general 'information consumer' within the enterprise either as a Web-based client (Spotfire DXP Web Player) or a rich interactive thick client (Spotfire DXP Enterprise Player). Additionally, a fully-featured desktop product (Spotfire DXP Professional) caters for the professional business analyst.

On the back-end, the Spotfire Analytics Server delivers centralised integration, deployment, and administration of the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform; and for the corporate developer there is a Software Developer Kit (SDK). This portfolio is supported by professional services from Spotfire covering implementation, data access support, analytical best practice, and solutions development. Moreover, Spotfire DecisionSite provides an analysis environment for technical analysts across multiple industries and processes, such as Research, Development, and Manufacturing. A full range of training services is also offered to help organisations get the most out of their Spotfire products.

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Product Operation

The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform offers a range of functionality and delivers key capabilities through an extensible architecture (see Figure 1). The primary attractions of the offering are:

Interactive visualisation The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform allows business users to gain new insights into their data by analysing it in a completely visual and interactive way. Visual analysis allows business professionals to spot trends and relationships in data that might otherwise remain hidden. The graphical user interface goes well beyond the typical aggregated pivot table so common in other BI products. Although Butler Group would not necessarily describe this as cutting-edge, it does exploit the presentation and display capabilities of today's modern PCs. Designed with a range of users in mind, the interactive nature of the client-centric products allow for dynamic filtering, querying, and drill-down, which enables users to ask new questions on-the-fly and instantaneously see the results in the graphical interface. Butler Group has already started to see vendors in this area exploiting the new presentation services of Windows Vista and Microsoft's .NET platform, and so we expect that TIBCO will continue to enhance its offerings through this technology.

In-memory analysis In common with other BI solutions, Spotfire allows business users to interactively analyse their data; however, unlike some of the more traditional approaches to BI, such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Spotfire uses in-memory processing to allow new aggregations, dimensions, measures, and hierarchies to be defined on-the-fly. While this facility might not suit every scenario, it should be of value to the majority of users performing analysis on typical datasets. Users of the solution are also able to analyse any local data that they have such as spreadsheets, databases, or data files and so are not limited to data warehouse or OLAP cubes. Of course this could be a curse as well as a blessing in terms of information governance, i.e. using unmanaged data sources with very little or no provenance, and so organisations should carefully consider their business controls and data quality policies to ensure that unmanaged local datasets are not relied upon to make important business decisions.

Guided analysis Beyond ad-hoc analysis, Spotfire allows end users to capture their analytic process as a guided workflow that can be shared with others a facility well suited to accelerating the enterprise-wide adoption of this solution. Guided analyses consist of a series of tabs with multiple visualisations that can be annotated with text explanations and links that capture important business insights. These visualisations can be securely shared with other users via the analytics server, and are available for use with both desktop and Web clients. By enabling experienced users within the business to develop, refine, and share business insights in this way, organisations become much less reliant on the IT department or business analysts, and as a result, the BI system should gain much more momentum and so can deliver much more business value.

Analytic clients Spotfire allows organisations to grow the reach and range of this analytics solution from a small group of primary users to every employee in the business or institution. Moreover, this offering is also capable of being deployed to customers and partners well beyond the corporate firewall. To accomplish this, the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform provides a range of client options to suit a variety of user needs. The various client options also facilitate a range of different deployment scenarios, from rich desktop clients for in-memory analysis, to Web clients running on a variety of platforms.

Analytics server The TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Server allows organisations to scale their BI deployments to encompass all users requiring access to the facilities afforded by this offering. The Spotfire Analytics Server provides a centralised point for security, data access, deployment, license management, and application sharing. Information Services allows information modelling across multiple back-end sources via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). Library Services allow users to publish and share analytic applications with other users either via desktop or Web clients. User Services allows the IT department to enforce security policies while leveraging existing systems like LDAP. Deployment Services allows the IT department to handle licensing and manage updates and feature-level functionality deployed to analytic clients.

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Platform extensibility A key feature of this platform is the SDK and Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow corporate developers and Systems Integrators to automate, integrate, and extend Spotfire to meet the analytic needs of the organisation. Of strategic consideration, this affords the opportunity for organisations to reduce the number of domain-specific analytic applications that they would otherwise have to purchase. Extensions to Spotfire are developed, debugged, and compiled in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 using C#, and are then centrally deployed via the server to end-user clients.

Product Emphasis

Speed, adaptability, and a compelling end-user experience are the areas in which the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform seeks to differentiate itself in the market. In terms of speed, in-memory analysis is one of the key product design aspects of this offering, and by supporting 64-bit versions of Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista, this solution is able to fully exploit today's high-end corporate PCs.

Spotfire's adaptability to new data and new business processes is supported at the functional level by the auto-configuration of the analysis environment based on the data provided, regardless of the source. Business users can then build their own applications simply by configuring visualisations, creating a guided analytic application that captures their own business workflow. Moreover, the APIs and SDK allow IT departments and SIs to automate, integrate, and extend the analytic platform to meet the needs of the business or institution.

Spotfire is very much a user-centric BI solution with a rich-user interface that provides a highly-visual and interactive-analysis environment. Suitable for technical experts and business managers alike, there is strong emphasis on dynamic and visual querying and filtering of data, drag-and-drop configuration of visualisations, interactively-linked visualisations ranging from typical bar and line charts to maps to box plots.

From a market perspective, TIBCO is targeting Spotfire at Global 2000 companies, including all of the world's top pharmaceutical, oil and gas companies, financial service organisations, and major high-tech manufacturers, as well as government agencies.

Butler Group segments the BI market into four main groups: platforms, high-end analytics, OLAP specialists, and BI-based applications, such as Corporate Performance Management (CPM). With the acquisition of Spotfire, TIBCO has chosen to enter a market with the likes of Business Objects (recently acquired by SAP), Cognos, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAS. Moreover, with vendors such as MicroStrategy, Actuate, and Pervasive Software also competing in this area, TIBCO will have to punch above its weight in order to make an impact on the market and to dislodge incumbent suppliers.

Better known for its business integration and process management software, TIBCO's Spotfire BI offering will most likely be considered as a solution for line-of-business users initially; but the company will no doubt be hoping that this acquisition opens up new avenues for revenue generation following a recent dip in profits.

DEPLOYMENT

The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform uses a client-server model, which includes clients to meet different types of users and deployment needs. At the data level, Spotfire does not have its own data repository and does not persist data; instead it loads data from backend sources via JDBC into client memory where it is analysed. Figure 1 presents a high-level view of this offering, with the main components consisting of the Analytics Server, Analytic Clients, SDK, and industry-specific analytic solutions.

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The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform can be installed and implemented with the skills typically found in most enterprise IT departments. Spotfire does have a services organisation that can assist with initial implementations, enterprise deployment, and application configuration. Organisations wanting to develop custom extensions, such as custom tools, data integrations, visualisations, etc, will require Microsoft .NET and C# programming resources.

Implementation time for BI solutions of any kind can be anything from days to weeks, and indeed for months if one includes the time required to gather requirements from the business. Spotfire, however, believes it can get organisations up-and-running faster than most. However, since Spotfire can analyse data from many existing sources, both back-end and local, the time-to-value of this offering is very attractive. Compared to the traditional BI approach, where a lot of work must be done up front by the IT department to define data structures and cubes, dimensions and measures, etc, this offering might be better suited to an application-centric BI requirement, since it allows the business users themselves to drive much of the application configuration.

Figure 2: TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform Deployment


The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is composed of several modules, consisting of server and analytic clients. Unlike many server-centric analytics products, analysis of data is performed at the desktop client rather than the server when using the rich client. While not suited to every usage scenario, the fact that the PC of today is probably as powerful as a server from two or three years ago, means that this model of BI analytics may well deliver a better end-user experience compared with other architectures, and so Butler Group would advise close examination of this aspect of this solution. For organisations that desire a Web-based approach, the Spotfire Web Player utilises server-based processing and zero-footprint Web clients.

Updates to server software are delivered as one-time deployment packages. Deployments are easily performed by using the Web-based administrator facilities. Once upgrades have been deployed to the server, distribution to clients automatically kicks-in at the next login.

Like other solution of this kind, support from the IT department is required. However, Spotfire affirms that this is primarily needed for creating Information Links, which allow business users controlled access to back-end data sources.

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From a maintenance perspective, organisations with current support and maintenance agreements receive notifications via e-mail on all new product releases. Moreover, additional proactive communication is sent via e-mail to named software license administrators relating to major changes in product features, system requirements, and critical updates affecting the designated product releases.

Extensive online and onsite training is offered by the company, and this ranges from basic product introduction to advanced analytical training for business users. Additional training is provided specifically for administrators and developers. Spotfire also offers Web-based training and regional training throughout the year.

Spotfire, a TIBCO division since June 2007, provides full support for the current major release of all products as well as one major release preceding it. Additionally, the company provides full support to the prior major release and incremental updates for 12 months after General Available release.

All client modules are supported on Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP4, Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2, Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit Edition SP2, Microsoft Windows Vista, and Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit Edition. The server module is supported on Microsoft Windows Server 2000 SP4 or higher and Microsoft Windows 2003 Server SP1 or higher. All versions of Spotfire require the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0.

The Spotfire Analytics Server module can connect to any database as long as it provides a JDBC/ODBC interface, and all Spotfire client software modules can also connect directly to any database as long as the database provides an ODBC or OLEDB interface. Spotfire Analytics Server System v10.0 also requires Oracle (10g Release 2 or Release 1, Oracle 9i Release 2, or Oracle 10g XE for Microsoft Windows) or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Enterprise, Workgroup, Standard, or Express). A bundled Oracle 10g XE database can optionally be installed by the Spotfire Analytics Server installer.

The standard Spotfire platform consists of the Spotfire Analytics Server and licensed user seats of TIBCO Spotfire Professional, the desktop analytic client. Optional, though commonly purchased items are:

TIBCO Spotfire Metrics Per-seat license for additional analytical tools package for Spotfire such as Dynamic Expressions, Box Plot and statistical aggregations, K-means Clustering, Line Similarity, etc.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Player Per-seat license for simplified, rich-client experience geared towards information consumers, to follow guided interactive analyses created on the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform.

TIBCO Spotfire Web Player Zero-footprint thin client for broad distribution of interactive reporting, to reach those both inside and outside the organisation.

TIBCO Spotfire Developer Software Development Kit with access to a complete set of Spotfire APIs, allowing customers to automate, integrate, and extend the Spotfire platform.

Spotfire Analytic Solutions Guided analytic solutions for specific vertical business processes, such as functional genomics and asset management.

PRODUCT STRATEGY

The TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is used across a wide range of horizontal business applications, e.g. budgeting analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, supply chain analytics, etc., and industry-specific vertical applications, e.g. asset management analytics, clinical trial analytics, semiconductor yield analytics, etc.

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The primary target market for the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is global 2000 organisations, i.e. companies with thousands of employees, generally distributed across numerous locations and business functions.

The Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform is sold through direct and indirect channels. The company has a direct sales force for selling to core markets, which includes Life Sciences, Financial Services, High Tech Manufacturing, Energy, and Government. The software is also sold to select markets indirectly via business partners and through its Web store.

Key alliances for the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform include: Reuters (VAR), SimCorp (OEM), Corelab (OEM), Next Level (OEM), Emergent-i (VAR), Xometrix (VAR), Taratec (VAR), and Integromics (VAR).

Competitors tend to fall into distinct categories, and include established BI vendors such Business Objects (now part of SAP), Cognos, and MicroStrategy. Other vendors, such as Tableau and SAS, compete in the areas of visualisation and statistics respectively.

COMPANY PROFILE

TIBCO Software (NASDAQ:TIBX) is a business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business. The company provides software that enables interoperability between applications and information sources, and co-ordinates processes that span systems and people. TIBCO offers a range of software products that can be sold individually to solve specific technical challenges.

In June 2007, TIBCO acquired Spotfire Holdings, a privately-held software company headquartered in Massachusetts, US, with more than 200 employees. Spotfire operates as a division within TIBCO.

The company's products are licensed by organisations worldwide in diverse industries such as Financial Services, Telecommunications, Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Energy, Transportation, Logistics, government, and insurance. The company sells its products through a direct sales force and through alliances with leading software vendors and systems integrators.

TIBCO sells its products individually to solve specific technical challenges, but the emphasis of its product development and sales effort is to create products that interoperate seamlessly and can be sold together as a suite. These products are positioned in four areas: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), business optimisation, and Master Data Management (MDM).

The company provides professional services, including a range of consulting services such as systems planning and design, installation and systems integration, and offers a suite of software support and maintenance options.

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Table 1: Financial Details

Year ending 30 November 2006 2005 2004Revenue (US$ Million) 517.28 445.91 387.22Change on Previous Year (%) 16.0 15.2 46.6Total Net Income/(Loss) (US$ Million) 72.86 72.56 44.92 Source: TIBCO D A T A M O N I T O R

SUMMARY

Spotfire is very much a "next-generation" BI platform, and promises radically faster data access and delivery. Spotfire has a strong customer base of over 1,000 active customers which include AMD, Boehringer Engelheim, Chevron, Merck, Pfizer, Shell, New Leaf, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, and Unilever. The acquisition of Spotfire by TIBCO in 2007 now allows the company to deliver complete real-time and event-driven software to businesses. TIBCO offers a wide range of products, but the emphasis of its product development and sales effort is to create products that interoperate seamlessly and that can be sold together as a suite. The company already provides solutions across a wide range of industries, and so this will provide an ideal target customer base for the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform. TIBCO's comprehensive suite of integration solutions serves as one of its key competitive strengths, and so it will be interesting to see how well TIBCO folds this BI offering into its growing product portfolio.

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Table 2: Contact Details

Spotfire A Division of TIBCO Software, Inc. 212 Elm Street Somerville, MA 02144 Tel: +1 617 702 1600 Fax: +1 617 702 1700 http://spotfire.tibco.com TIBCO Software, Inc. 3303 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto California 94304 USA Tel: +1 650 846 1000 Fax: +1 650 846 1005 www.tibco.com

TIBCO Software No 1 Cornhill London EC3V 3ND UK Tel: +44 207 743 6220 Fax: +44 207 743 6221 www.tibco.com


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Butler Group 245 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10016, USA Tel: +1 212 652 5302 Fax: +1 212 202 4684

Important Notice

This report contains data and information up-to-date and correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of preparation. The data and information comes from a variety of sources outside our direct control, therefore Butler Direct Limited cannot give any guarantees relating to the content of this report. Ultimate responsibility for all interpretations of, and use of, data, information and commentary in this report remains with you. Butler Direct Limited will not be liable for any interpretations or decisions made by you.

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FUNCTIONALITYProduct AnalysisProduct OperationProduct Emphasis

DEPLOYMENTPRODUCT STRATEGYCOMPANY PROFILESUMMARY

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