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Reference Code: TA001359BIN

Publication Date: January 2008


Author: Richard Edwards

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-ofthe-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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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

Published 01/2008
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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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 standalone databases in order to make sense out of chaos.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Figure 1:

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform

Source: TIBCO

DATAMONITOR

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. 'Spreadsheetsprawl' 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 usercentric 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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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

Published 01/2008
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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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Published 01/2008
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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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 applicationcentric BI requirement, since it allows the business users themselves to drive much of the application
configuration.
Figure 2:

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform Deployment

Source: TIBCO

DATAMONITOR

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 Webbased 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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Table 1:

Financial Details

Year ending 30 November


Revenue (US$ Million)
Change on Previous Year (%)
Total Net Income/(Loss) (US$ Million)
Source: TIBCO

2006

2005

2004

517.28

445.91

387.22

16.0

15.2

46.6

72.86

72.56

44.92
DATAMONITOR

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 eventdriven 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.

TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise Analytics Platform


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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

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

Source: TIBCO

DATAMONITOR

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This report contains data and information upto-date and correct to the best of our
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