Tag Archives: Spotfire
Spotfire 11: Hyperconverged Analytics Unleashed
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Converging analytics capabilities and roles are trending. Are you ready?
The value of analytics is found in salient, unexpected insights—and in surfacing and sharing those discoveries with the entire organization, faster. TIBCO Spotfire 11 is built to provide more of this value, by taking advantage of a trend recently noted by Gartner. That trend is the convergence of analytics capabilities and user roles. In this blog, you’ll learn more about this convergence, and why this next evolution of Spotfire is uniquely able to meet the need of converging analytics teams for more quality insights, fast.
The future state of analytics goes beyond “zombie dashboards”
Why has Gartner called attention to the trending convergence of analytics capabilities and roles? Organizations increasingly realize that, to increase the quality and quantity of insights obtained from analytics, you need to go beyond flat, static dashboards and analytics silos. Doing so requires a convergence of capabilities and roles.
Specifically, you need a team empowered to deliver:
- Dynamic, immersive analysis and dashboarding. Data analysts need to be able to drill down into interesting patterns quickly, whether through brushlinking or multilayer geoanalytics. They need to spend less time preparing data and waiting for IT support, and more time immersed in insights discovery. And analysts need to ensure that nothing interesting is missed, by using AI-enabled analytics to suggest new paths for exploration.
- Embedded data science. To expand the impact of data science resources for richer analytics, you need an analytics platform that enables data scientists and advanced analysts to put the algorithm and embedded Python and R scripts “behind the button” for other analysts and business users alike. In this way, the entire organization can go, in one click, beyond descriptive and diagnostic analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics.
- Simplified access to more data, including real-time data, for analysis. Especially during times of unprecedented change, you need more than rear-view mirror historic data for analysis. Ideally, you need a seamless way to perform analysis that includes both historic and real-time data, and an analytics platform that supports fast access to ANY data that could be relevant for insights. Further, you need a platform that speeds and automates data preparation and data wrangling.
Anything less, and you’re trapped in the land of flat analytics dashboards, or what we call “zombie dashboards.” Like zombies from a horror movie, flat dashboards might seem alive—but they’re metaphorically eating your organization’s best brains by failing to quickly deliver the most valuable insights. Flat dashboards are an artifact of a non-converged approach to analytics, and these zombie dashboards can’t support a converging analytics future.
Why the future of analytics is Hyperconverged
This converging analytics future is brought to life in the newest major release of TIBCO Spotfire, Spotfire 11. Not only does Spotfire 11 enable immersive analytics, embedded data science, and real-time streaming analytics—and the “analytics-as-team-sport” approach taken by analytics-mature organizations—it does so in a way that’s seamless, robust, and provides full support for the governance needed. Spotfire 11 goes beyond convergence into “hyperconvergence.”
The “hyper” in Hyperconverged Analytics isn’t just hype. With Spotfire 11, Hyperconverged Analytics means you get the insights that can result in:
- Hypereffective customer intimacy. By making it easier to blend historic and real-time analytics, you can outperform your competition in providing world-class customer experiences and customer service. See the Bank of Montreal case study for one such example.
- Hyperefficient business operations. With immersive, smart, and real-time analytics in a seamless analytics platform, you can go well beyond descriptive and diagnostic analytics for best-in-class operational efficiency. See CAF’s case study for how this works in the real world.
- Hypereconomical waste reduction. No matter the waste reduction use case—whether in manufacturing, logistics, or any other industry—Hyperconverged Analytics gives you the most valuable insights. See Hemlock Semiconductor’s case study for what the benefits can be.
Unleash your analytics creativity with Spotfire Mods
Not only does Spotfire 11 take you beyond zombie dashboards by enabling Hyperconverged Analytics, it makes it easier to create more value and more insights through fit-for-purpose custom analytics applications. With our newly introduced Spotfire Mods, a lightweight framework for building custom analytics apps that leverage all the power of Spotfire, you can quickly create governed, easy-to-share applications that extend the power of custom analytics insights wherever they’re needed most.
These apps can further extend the power of Spotfire’s immersive, hyperconverged experience across your organization through visualizations that bring the most valuable insights to life.
The value of analytics is found in salient, unexpected insights—and in surfacing and sharing those discoveries with the entire organization, faster. Click To Tweet
Get ready for the convergence—read the Gartner report, view our webinars
To sum up—the need for better insights, faster, points towards a convergence of analytics technologies and roles. How will you know you’re ready for the convergence discussed by Gartner? Read their report for the background you need. And remember, with Hyperconverged Analytics, Spotfire 11 brings the power of that convergence to your teams and your organization, while unleashing their creativity with Spotfire Mods custom analytics apps.
Ready to learn more about Spotfire 11? Learn more about why Spotfire Mods matter—watch Spotfire Product Manager Magnus Rylander discuss the power of Mods here. And trial it free, now.
3 Ways Spotfire is Unique Compared to Tableau
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The advent of hyperconverged analytics
TIBCO Spotfire® takes a unique approach to business intelligence (BI) in three ways. It’s designed to be immersive, smart, and real-time. I’ll explain each, beginning with immersive BI.
IMMERSIVE: PARTICIPATORY BI
Modern BI tools have two common interaction modes: immersive exploration and dashboards. A dashboard is a visualization designed for a well-understood business purpose. For example, a sales forecast dashboard shows answers to questions like: “Will I achieve my revenue targets this quarter?” “Which sales reps are performing the best?” “Which regions are performing the best?”
Analysts create BI dashboards for the people who need answers. The knowledge worker views the dashboards. Thinking follows a path divined by the dashboard author.
Knowledge workers use immersive BI, by contrast, for serendipitous exploration. Rather than being a recipient of someone else’s thinking, they think for themselves. The tool helps them immerse themselves in data, explore connections, and discover insights.
Dashboards share answers to well-understood problems. Sales forecasts, financial reports, marketing leads. Immersive BI helps knowledge workers explore. Drug discovery, oil exploration, competitive intelligence, customer engagement.
Spotfire dashboards are immersive and enable analysts to discover unexpected insights. It also shows an “algorithm behind a button.
Immersive BI is analogous to participatory art. The audience enters the artistic experience with the artist. Immersive BI invites knowledge workers to jump inside their data. Dashboards, by contrast, are like a painting: you can’t join the artist’s experience.
SMART: DATA SCIENCE-DRIVEN BI
The second area of differentiation is smart, or data-science-driven BI.
Every company is trying to get more value from data science and machine learning. Most firms can’t afford to hire dozens of data scientists. Data-science-driven BI puts predictive analytics, forecasts, and algorithms in a visual context. Spotfire makes it easy to embed data science algorithms in visualizations. Making data science insights available via a visual interface, makes it easy for anyone, not just data scientists, to gain access to these previously unavailable, but extremely valuable insights.
As Michelle Lacy, from Bayer Precision Agriculture, a TIBCO customer, puts it, “Spotfire helps us put the algorithm behind a button.”
The example from Bayer above shows a data-science-driven dashboard at work. It’s a view of how a domain expert might hunt for the best location for a health clinic and be aided by the extra layer of data science insights. By lassoing an area, the visualization morphs, powered by an R model Michelle, at Bayer, is not a data scientist but is able to harness the insights from machine learning algorithms that were previously unavailable to her.
To make their decision, Bayer Precision Agriculture evaluated every BI tool, including Tableau and Power BI. To again quote Michelle, “nothing comes close” to how Spotfire puts Python and R behind a button.
REAL-TIME: STREAMING BI
Finally, there’s real-time. Spotfire embeds a streaming analytics engine inside, giving users of the dashboard access to real-time data and therefore real-time insights in the BI tool. Visualizations display data in motion as it changes. Industry analysts refer to this unique model as streaming BI. Streaming BI is becoming essential for digital transformation. Analysts can explore any connected person, place, or thing.
The visualizations below show real-time data from a Formula One wind-tunnel simulation. The location on a chosen track and sensor readings show the real-time state of the simulation.
Real-time feedback in context with history is essential. Anything in red means this configuration is performing worse than our best lap. Anything in green is better.
You’re having an aha moment, aren’t you? At a glance, you might observe that although our current speed is good, our brakes are running hot. Is that what we want? Should we adjust the brakes for this track because that’s the best balance?
With real-time feedback, learning happens faster. This learning can be the difference between winning and losing.
Making data science insights available via a visual interface, makes it easy for anyone, not just data scientists, to gain access to these previously unavailable, but extremely valuable insights. Click To Tweet
THE FUTURE OF ANALYTICS IS IMMERSIVE, SMART, AND REAL-TIME
Tableau and other dashboard-centric BI tools are fantastic tools. But for BI that’s immersive, data science-driven and real-time, Spotfire is the tool of choice.TIBCO Spotfire and the new TIBCO Cloud™ Data Streams software are available now in the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Cloud. Log into your TIBCO account and start exploring real-time data in minutes! Visit the Real-Time Analytics page to get your free 30-day trial started.
Why TIBCO Spotfire is the Ideal Tool for Network Analytics
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Any type of network downtime has a significant impact on today’s businesses. According to a recent study by Statista the average cost of IT downtime is between $ 350,000 and $ 400,000 per hour.
For this reason, IT teams rely on network analytics tools to identify key trends and patterns occurring in a network to ensure their networks perform at an optimal level.
Today, with a steep increase in network complexity and the added pressure of demand for improved reliability, there’s a need for an evolution in approach to network monitoring. IT teams need richer analytics along with monitoring to surface issues before they become problems. TIBCO Spotfire is a proven solution. Using search and recommendations powered by a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) engine, Spotfire enables you to more easily visualize new discoveries about your network.
Let’s have a look at some of the capabilities of TIBCO Spotfire that makes it an ideal tool for Network Analytics.
1. Smart, Immersive Visual Analytics
- Spotfire offers a user-friendly interface providing visual tools for easy data exploration so you can quickly get insights from your data. The rich and interactive dashboards, brushlinking, and point-and-click data exploration provide powerful analytics capabilities.
- Powered by AI, Spotfire automatically recommends various visualizations for different relationships in your data, making it far faster and easier to get insights. AI recommendations help in loading, linking, categorizing, and navigating data for an overall faster analysis.
- Spotfire makes it easy for analytics and business leaders to build analytical applications through a guided workflow.
2. Location Analytics
- Location Analytics in Spotfire provides spatial analytics for everyone. Its depth and analytical capabilities make it easier to understand predictions and optimization through locations. Spotfire automatically adds location context to your analysis that would not be possible using traditional charts and tables.
- Multi-layer maps allow you to drill down, within, and between layers to add more context to your maps for location-based insights. This can be further enriched by including other data sources and adding multiple layers to the data.
3. Real-Time Analytics
- Understanding what is happening in real-time is imperative for Network Analytics. TIBCO Spotfire natively supports real time streaming data to provide real-time views into the network, enabling real time analysis.
- Spotfire data streams are designed for demanding network enterprise environments with tens of millions of events a day per network, and thousands of continuous, streaming queries.
Why Your Investment in Network Analytics Demands Spotfire’s Capabilities
According to an IDC FutureScape Report, there will be an acceleration to cloud-centric technologies and edge deployments will be a top priority. These are the top two trends we could see in the near future; what weaves them together is the network health of your business. To make your business operations resilient and drive competitive advantage, you need network analytics that bring the most valuable insights to you.
The bottom line: You have to know why your network behaves the way it does. You need to be able to compare historic data with real-time data in a single environment for the most current, comprehensive view of IT networks, and for the insights into behavior that matter most. Network Analytics empowers your IT teams with information about network health, helps your leaders determine performance trends, and provides historical network data that can provide benefits for the entire enterprise.
From traffic to business initialization with application sharing, IT teams need insights to solve business problems. Network analytics pinpoints specific issues determining what, when, and how. Predictive analytics assists to potentially prevent future performance network issues if a repeated event is suggested by the data. And Spotfire shines in immersive, smart, real-time analytics, enabling predictive and even prescriptive analytics.
Powered by AI, Spotfire automatically recommends various visualizations for different relationships in your data, making it far faster and easier to get insights. Click To Tweet
Forward-thinking IT organizations are increasingly adopting solutions like TIBCO Spotfire, because of the value provided through instant AI solutions to solve real-time requirements with intelligent and automated network insights. To learn more about how to implement Network Analytics for your businesses, please contact us.
Datathon Winner: Best Analytics Visualization Using TIBCO Spotfire
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Oil and gas and energy professionals came together this summer for an amazing, data-driven event. Untapped Energy and the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) organized and hosted an incredible event, the DUC Datathon a.k.a. Drilled but Uncompleted Wells Datathon. Bringing together hundreds of students and energy professionals, participants gained access to virtual sessions, data bootcamps, and lively competitions.
TIBCO was excited to sponsor the event and provided free access to TIBCO Spotfire®, an advanced analytics tool that is very popular in the global energy sector. Our very own Michael O’Connell, TIBCO Chief Analytics Officer, kicked off the competition with a fantastic keynote.
We even had a competition of our own! Worthy competitors went head to head to create the “Best Visualization Using TIBCO Spotfire.” There was no shortage of creativity and talent, but in the end only one champion could be crowned for their outstanding efforts: Dean Udsen. Udsen is an accomplished data and analytics consultant in the energy space. Over the last decade, he has been widely recognized for his efforts with TIBCO customers.
Udsen decided to join the Datathon to stay busy, motivated, and continue his learning this summer. And his enthusiasm paid off, winning him a pair of Bose 700 headphones. There’s a lot we can learn from Udsen’s success. Below we’ll take a look at a few examples of how he helps TIBCO Spotfire customers in Western Canada create real business value.
Providing Value to Customers
Udsen’s success is based on his core best practices: It’s essential to have a deep understanding of your clients’ goals and ensure you’re working towards a common objective. It’s also important to work with the client team at their comfort level. Some organizations are experienced and ready to move quickly. Others take time to ramp up their capabilities and develop trust in the analytics.
Udsen believes that integrating data is the “secret sauce” for all organizations to identify ways to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. By providing advice and experience on how to pull the data together, he helps clients quickly build dashboards that are providing the business with real value.
Today, there is often an impulse to either build everything all at once or to build all the backend components to support all potential processes before an end-user sees anything. But, according to Udsen, it’s better to start with one or two business processes and build them from beginning to end. This gives end-users something to start working with, shows them the potential, and allows the team to learn as they go. Plus, you gain immediate value as clients use the new process quickly to help make business decisions.
It’s important to not employ technology for the sake of technology. In a very price sensitive environment, you need to implement tactical projects that provide an immediate benefit. First, understand what is the most important issue for the client, and then look for the quickest way to improve.
Now, let’s look at a few customer examples from Dean Udsen’s past projects:
- Radical Improvements in Time to Acquisition Analysis: One client wanted to improve their acquisition process and significantly decrease the amount of time needed to perform analysis. How accurate were their forecasts for price, production volumes, revenue, etc. in comparison to the reality of what happened in the ensuing years? They built the dashboard below using Spotfire to combine data from public data sources, internal accounting, and forecasting software. It allows the team to quickly and easily compare the forecasted vs. actual data of any acquisition.
- An Evolution in Weekly Production Reporting to Immersive, Real-Time Reporting: In the past, another client of Udsen’s met each week to compare weekly production using print out hard copy reports for each well. Now, with a new dashboard built using Spotfire (pictured below), the team has an automated way to review the data. The team can select the report week, group wells by their pad location, and investigate individual wells in real time. They can easily compare wells and pads to each other, and the amount of time required to prepare for the meeting is now zero. The data is available on demand without having to wait for the reports.
- Faster Well Counting, from Weeks to Hours: Another client previously used a quarterly report process to review industry activity and predict how many wells would be drilled on their royalty lands. This process took weeks to complete each quarter. The dashboard below, again built using Spotfire, speeds up this process greatly, allowing the team to get updates every day and see up to the minute activity and expected well counts as they occur. It combines data from a number of sources including public data, land, and GIS data to automatically determine which wells are “on the lands” and whether the expected drilling matches the company’s mineral rights.
- Deeper Insights into Well Operations: Engineers at one company needed a quick way to combine data between their production, accounting, and drilling applications. A quick look at each well was needed to ensure optimal performance and that costs were being contained. Working with the engineers, a number of charts were developed using Spotfire to meet this need, looking at the physical operations of the wells, along with the production and sales revenues. See example below:
Get started with TIBCO Spotfire
These are just a few examples of the successful use cases saving Spotfire users time and money. In fact, according to one customer:
“Spotfire enables us to bring together several disparate data sets, both internal and external to the company. We can then visualize relationships and develop insights about our business, without spending most of our time collecting, curating, modifying, and combining data. The results are easily shared, and often generate new ideas that lead to even further leverage of our data, and impact the strategic activities within the business.”
It’s essential to have a deep understanding of your clients’ goals and ensure you’re working towards a common objective. It’s also important to work with the client team at their comfort level. Click To Tweet
Interested in implementing any of the use cases mentioned above or others? Implement TIBCO Spotfire and enable everyone to visualize new discoveries in your data, quickly and easily.
Crunching Queries at Scale: How Spotfire Customers Get “Redshift Ready” Cloud Analytics with AWS
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For today’s most mature enterprise cloud architectures, ultra-quick querying capabilities on petabytes of data is what the modern pace of business demands. And for enterprises running AWS, Amazon Redshift is most certainly a part of the data warehousing picture given its size, flexibility, and scale. Fast, fully-managed warehousing services make it simple and cost-efficient to analyze all your data right within your business intelligence (BI) and analytics platforms.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce that TIBCO Spotfire® is now “Redshift Ready” as part of the AWS Service Ready program!
The Amazon Redshift connector for Spotfire has been enhanced in all facets from authentication to point-and-click Spectrum and geospatial support. Plus, as part of the AWS Service Ready Program, TIBCO Spotfire has been recognized as a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), validating that it is a product that integrates with Amazon Redshift, and is fully supported for AWS customers. In addition, Amazon has verified that Spotfire meets a standard of demonstrating several best practices in its integration with Amazon Redshift and the AWS Cloud.
But what exactly does this partnership mean for TIBCO customers?
How Spotfire & AWS Combine to Create New Value for Current Customers
A primary advantage of having a fast database is the ability to perform in-database analytics, performing SQL queries both live and ad hoc. This may include data extracts that can be imported on demand, for example to feed data functions and custom expressions back into Spotfire analyses.
It’s an attractive solution for those aiming to optimize costs at scale, with datasets ranging from several hundred gigabytes to petabyte or more and costs roughly 10 percent of the amount of traditional data warehousing (less than $ 1,000 per terabyte annually).
By combining Spectrum with Spotfire® GeoAnalytics, the in-memory data engine combines the ability to drill down and across multi-layer map charts with ease all while connecting to geospatial files in S3 with just a few clicks. It’s as if you were connecting to regular Redshift data tables.
Why Redshift Matters for Spotfire Users
By pairing with Spotfire, Redshift complements “the need for speed” for joint users running ad-hoc analytics queries on vast amounts of data.
Simply connect Spotfire to your Amazon Redshift warehouse to explore your data with ease alongside the many other data sources—both at-rest and in-motion—all in one analysis environment for the most comprehensive view of your business.
Simply connect Spotfire to your Amazon Redshift warehouse to explore your data with ease alongside the many other data sources—both at-rest and in-motion—all in one analysis environment for the most comprehensive view of your business. Click To Tweet
A comprehensive understanding of your data is at the core of data-informed decision making models. Therefore, data access remains a hot topic among Spotfire users, working with an expansive list of data sources across vast ecosystems, demanding the very latest support for native self-service and custom data connectors. Of course, Spotfire connects to any data source: relational, cubes, files, NoSQL, REST, unstructured, cloud, or on-premises.
To learn the latest of all that’s new with Amazon Redshift, visit AWS resources for more.
The Journey of Generation A(X): Top 5 Highlights from Spotfire 10
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First introduced in the fall of 2018, TIBCO Spotfire®’s A(X) experience, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven analytics experience, delivers agile, augmented analytics for better, faster decision making. Building upon this momentum and listening to user feedback, TIBCO has prioritized several usability improvements and feature enhancements since the last Long-Term Supported (LTS) release (version 10.3) in mid-2019.
Several of these new capabilities—from “Interactive AI” to streaming analytics in the web client to native Python—provide organizations with more accessible data exploration and quicker insights for everyone.
Below are five highlights of the top technology advancements available by upgrading to the latest LTS release of Spotfire® version 10.10.
1. Interactive AI: Insights on Marked Data
With a simple lasso of a data point, AI-assisted exploration answers the questions that you didn’t know how to put into words! Spotfire®’s Recommendations engine automatically identifies interesting patterns in your data, guiding even less-experienced analysts to the most significant relationships to explore. “Interactive AI” aids users by isolating root causes of potential patterns (e.g. an outlier, shifting negative trend).
Takeaway: Interactive AI allows even non-technical users to borrow the brain of a data scientist and create analytics applications in seconds flat—without any expertise—thus shortening the road to insight by simply asking, “What’s different about these?”
2. Streaming Visual Analytics on the Web
Any business dealing with events data in terms of velocity, direction, and momentum can derive value from streaming visual analytics. Spotfire® provides the industry’s first true streaming business intelligence solution, offering one single visual analytics environment with built-in capabilities for diagnostic, predictive, and streaming analytics.
Streaming visual analytics transforms what was once static, historical rear-view monitoring into an immersive environment for predictive and prescriptive analytics. Streaming visual analytics enables richer insights, served up through dashboards and analyses, that support taking better actions. This is essential because the speed of business today demands:
- Adapting and responding to frequency of rapidly developing events and changing conditions
- Making urgent data-informed (at times automated) decisions based on deeper advanced analytics
Streaming visual analytics transforms what was once static, historical rear-view monitoring into an immersive environment for predictive and prescriptive analytics. Click To Tweet
Takeaway: Streaming analytics is not just delivering real-time data but also real-time analysis, blending with historical data to inform timely decision-making. Whether for logistics companies, manufacturers, or others seeking operational excellence and cost optimization, streaming visual analytics is imperative. Decision makers are better enabled to act on the most current state of the business when consuming real-time insights via “always-ON” web dashboards and apps.
3. Native Python Data Functions
Our feature in-focus, it’s a case of: you asked and we answered. By popular demand!
With support for writing and managing native Python data functions, Spotfire® provides an interface between visual analytics and advanced analytics with very tight integration. Python has the highest rate of growth among coding languages and is the language of choice for many data scientists, so it was natural for TIBCO to introduce support in Spotfire® for native Python data functions across the Analyst client, web, and Automation Services. Many Spotfire® customers’ IT leaders channeled the voices of their data scientist teams with this request, as this frees them up from manual low-value tasks of duplicating data across different environments. This all allows for the same ease and convenience that users of TERR and “R” language bundled packages have enjoyed for many years in Spotfire®—now for Python.
[*NOTE for users on earlier versions: It was already possible to use Python data functions prior to 10.7 through the data function extension available on the TIBCO Community. However, there’s no longer a need to use that extension as Python data functions are now supported natively right within the environment.]
Takeaway: One TIBCO partner endorsed this as, “…VERY complex analytics on the fly, without leaving [the] environment!” Writing and managing native Python data functions in Spotfire® consolidates several advanced analytics workflows—typically involving several tools—to cut the high cost of task switching.
4. Powerful Location Analytics Enhancements
Spotfire® location analytics extends far beyond merely plotting markers on a map. It’s truly immersive and automates the process of creating maps with instant geocoding, enriching the context for spatial patterns and relationships within multiple data layers, map services, and GIS data. It unlocks the use of advanced spatial processing techniques leveraging geographic services and data functions for seamless location-based exploration.
Spotfire®’s latest version now includes all of the following capabilities in map charts:
- Leverage geo-reference info from GeoTIFFs to position images on maps automatically at the right location and with the right projection
- Position images via drag and drop
- Calculate geo-spatial distance for streaming data
- Pan & zoom when Auto-Zoom is enabled
- Ease of use and productivity improvements
Takeaway: In a highly interactive visual application built upon embedded data science, instant recalculations of the models inform new sectors on-the-fly, offering the center of newly drawn areas accelerates the speed to insight.
5. More and More Data Connectivity Added
Native self-service connectors support 59 data sources (and counting!) right in the Spotfire® platform. This list is continually growing, with native connectors to the most popular hybrid cloud databases like Teradata, to applications like SharePoint Online and Salesforce, as well as those really hot cloud analytics data warehouses like Google BigQuery and Snowflake that combine data warehousing with your data lake, just to name a few.
Spotfire® users also connecting to streaming data are able to subscribe to 100+ streaming sources available through Spotfire® Data Streams to blend real-time analysis alongside your historical data.
Takeaway: Rich, disparate data is the core of any thorough analysis. TIBCO is always committed to adding new connectors—both native and custom—to Spotfire®, so customers gain an improved, holistic understanding of their business landscapes and markets.
With these advanced capabilities, innovative organizations can redefine what’s possible with analytics and business intelligence. For a closer look at all of “What’s new in Spotfire®,” explore the recent Dr. Spotfire sessions.
How to Get the Most out of Python in Spotfire®
Reading Time: 3 min 30 secs.
For recent grads and new data scientists coming into the fold, Python has clearly become the most popular programming language of choice over the past 24 months. Considering its rate of growth and widespread usage, evidenced by the sheer count of mentions in Data Scientist job descriptions, we can say with a fair degree of confidence: there’s a strong likelihood that Python is here to stay. And, our customers are clamoring for it. Well, you asked and we listened. You can now write Python natively within TIBCO Spotfire®, without the need for other tools. Read on for more exciting developments of how you can get the most out of Python in Spotfire®.
Write and manage Python natively
With the same ease and convenience of writing R language functions and managing those packages, Spotfire® users will find the Python experience released in 10.7 similar to how stats and ML libraries may be leveraged to build data functions as the basis for exploratory analysis, dashboards, or advanced analytics applications. The Spotfire® Analyst client now comes with a bundled Python engine for adding or importing Python packages for use with Spotfire® data functions. Writing Python functions natively within Spotfire® blends a streamlined offering for visual and advanced analytics by:
- Eliminating barriers for sharing value with more stakeholders throughout the enterprise when relying upon several disparate tools, some open source
- Simplifying the high-cost of task switching across various tools; translating single data science projects across platforms requires heavy manual work involving duplicative efforts (similar to the classic inefficiencies of legacy BI – ETL workflows)
A streamlined data science workflow benefits the enterprise
By embedding models into visual analytics, data science is driving better decision frameworks for improved outcomes. This makes each side of the “barbell” in large organizations more efficient: enabling citizen data scientists to self-serve quickly and use apps with advanced analytics underpinning them—essentially running Python functions as an engine within dashboards—all while liberating data scientists from low value, time-consuming tasks.
Just as with the classic data preparation inefficiency of basic formatting tasks over actual analysis, these are wasteful activities for highly valuable, and expensive, data science resources. Furthermore, this duality also frees up Data Scientists to spend time modeling deeper analyses by running workflows created by TIBCO® Data Science. In this way, Spotfire® satisfies coders and non-coders alike, expanding the reach of data science across organizations by creating more advanced analytics applications.
As embedded analyses are widely shared and consumed through dashboards, this also prompts the savvy analyst or citizen data scientist to explore them or even customize completely new low-code custom apps through self-service analytics. It’s through the automation of these workflows that Spotfire® serves end-to-end analytics use cases across the enterprise.
[NOTE: Spotfire® 10.7 provides native Python support in Spotfire®. For those users on earlier versions of Spotfire®, there are still other options for using Python. For more info, visit our TIBCO Community resource]
All with the Appropriate Governance
All of this is made available while showing appropriate care and concern for governing which packages are used across an organization. Designs of a seamless, invisible workflow in Spotfire ensures that all Python users utilize the same packages and versions of packages. Administrators or superusers can control which packages and versions of packages are automatically available, providing the potential for embedding Python packages in Spotfire for individual or group-level access privileges.
This is your opportunity to deliver more business value to your stakeholders and expand the reach of data science across your organization with advanced analytics applications using Python. For more on how to get the most out of Python in Spotfire® 10.7, watch our On-demand Dr. Spotfire® session with TIBCO Data Scientist, Neil Kanungo. Also, check out additional resources on TIBCO Community for more information about how to use the new native Python Data functions in Spotfire®.
A Look at My First 30 days at TIBCO Through the Lens of Spotfire
If you’re a data analyst who’s evaluating TIBCO Spotfire, or a Spotfire customer, I’m delighted to virtually meet you—my name is Lori Witzel, I’m the new Director of Product Marketing for Spotfire, and a large part of my role for Spotfire will involve listening to and learning from analysts and customers like you. In this blog, I’ll share a non-traditional look at my first 30 days with TIBCO, using a metaphorical framework that echoes some of what I’ve heard about Spotfire.
Augmented intelligence makes for better outcomes
Listening to and learning from many different sources is a core function for Product Marketing Managers (PMM) and research shows that more sources make for better outcomes. These diverse sources augment a Product Marketer’s own experience and intelligence, making it more likely that the products a PMM supports will delight their customers. (This constant learning is also a key reason why I love being a PMM.)
In my first 30 days with TIBCO, it’s clear that augmented intelligence is not just what our analytics products provide–it’s infused throughout the organization, in the quality and volume of information shared among teams and via business systems to enable better real-time decision-making. In a less metaphorical way, what I’ve heard from analysts like you: Spotfire’s ability to seamlessly consume disparate data, whether at-rest, streaming, on-premises, or in the cloud, augments business intelligence and enables better decision-making.
Adaptive intelligence transforms—and is transformed by—the process of learning
There are few things more exciting than starting something new–whether it’s a new job or a new high-impact project—learning through discovery changes the way we fit into and improve the world around us. I’m learning and discovering new things every day at TIBCO, and being stretched and challenged in all the best ways. As I adapt and transform myself, I’ve heard that my new-to-TIBCO perspective is transforming how our teams engage with data analysts like you.
My first 30 days at TIBCO have been the start of a great adventure in learning, and you can help me as I learn and evolve. I’d love to connect, and would love to learn if you’ve explored AI-infused discovery in Spotfire X. Message me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/loriaustex.
Working and learning at the edge
Because of the importance of listening and learning for a PMM, metaphorically speaking, the role embodies aspects of streaming intelligence. We’re “at the edge,” gathering information from people like you, from disparate sources through real-time engagement and interactions. This information becomes something we can act on to generate insights for our colleagues and our peers. Those insights, in turn, are shared back out to the source – analysts like you – in the form of product enhancements, which in turn leads back to further information gathering. In these early days at TIBCO, the new information I’m exposed to is daunting—but it’s part of working at the edge, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Let’s augment our intelligence together
For data analysts who are ready to evolve their careers and their organizations, Spotfire is the de facto standard for analytics augmented intelligence. My request? Let’s take that next step in augmented intelligence together. If you’re a Spotfire user, an analytics professional, a data scientist, I want to learn from you and hear your analytics stories–what’s important to you, what your use cases have been, how a recent discovery via analytics has made a difference. Look for me at TIBCO NOW London, at other upcoming Spotfire events, or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/loriaustex. I hope you’ll connect, and help make my next 30 days as exciting as my first 30 days.
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Learn all about Spotfire, join the Spotfire community and watch the Dr. Spotfire channel on YouTube.
Hang 10: Spotfire Cited as a Leader in Forrester Enterprise BI Wave
In The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise BI Platforms (Vendor-Managed), Q3 2019, TIBCO Spotfire® is positioned as a Leader following an extensive evaluation of vendors across several key measures. Given its placement, Spotfire® will continue to ride a strong tide of market momentum. According to the report, “customers especially praised Cloud Spotfire for its ease of use and search UI/data discovery and exploration.”
TIBCO believes that Spotfire®’s scores in the ‘Current Offering’ category are due in large part to the generational set of capabilities introduced in Spotfire® X (version 10). Spotfire® X capabilities extend well beyond basic business intelligence (BI) dashboarding to serve a variety of analytics needs across the enterprise. Spotfire® X’s rich support for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommendations along with Natural Language Querying (NLQ) capabilities enables business users to have a conversation with data and explore freely. Additionally, automated workflows for simplified data wrangling further enhance the Spotfire® X experience.
Below is a breakdown of some of the criteria that Spotfire® received the highest possible score in, as well as TIBCO’s take on how it addresses those criteria:
Augmented Business Intelligence. TIBCO Takeaway: Spotfire®’s machine learning, predictive analytics, and advanced analytics capabilities empower business analysts and other “non-data scientists” to become citizen data scientists with automated, guided workflows.
Big Data. TIBCO Takeaway: With Spotfire®, users have the ability to connect to and analyze various complex and disparate data sources with ease. Users can ingest and analyze billions of rows of raw, unmodeled data and push query processing to a distributed in-cluster platform.
Data Preparation. TIBCO Takeaway: Today, analytics workers spend approximately 80 percent of their collective analytics time preparing data for analysis. So, while data is widely viewed as the “new oil,” it (much like oil) remains a raw material in need of much refining for the desired byproduct of business insights. Spotfire® is that refinery. And its ranked highly in part for how well it simplifies data wrangling workflows with automated tasks.
Deployment Options. TIBCO Takeaway: Spotfire® is designed to scale to a large number of users, data, and physical locations as a versatile best-in-class solution for meeting customers’ unique business requirements whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud.Read the full report to learn why TIBCO Spotfire® is rated as a leader among Vendor-managed Enterprise BI Platforms.
Optimizing MMA Fighting with TIBCO Spotfire® Software
What does TIBCO and MMA fighting have in common? TIBCO Spotfire® software.
Attendees at TIBCO NOW had the pleasure of watching professional MMA fighter, Allen Crowder spar while watching the readout of his body stats in real time. The fighter has been working with his trainer, Jesse Rey, a veteran employee who uses Spotfire software at Goya Foods, and Rishi Shah, at TIBCO, to experiment with Spotfire software as it relates to MMA fighting. Since Rey works at Goya Foods and interacts with Spotfire software on a regular basis, he thought it would be an interesting experiment to run.
With Spotfire, Shah and Rey found a way to tap into the human body as a source of data. They were able to receive signals from muscles to better understand contractions, intensity, velocity, and ultimately the point of fatigue. This data can then be displayed on a live dashboard to help Rey and Crowder optimize training and performance.
From a coaching perspective, Rey wants to understand the data, whether it’s a heart rate, punch count, oxygen level, or more. He sees using science and technology as an opportunity for improvement to take Crowder to another level.
For the demo, Shah put sensors on certain muscle groups of Crowder’s—two on the deltoids and two on the legs. These wires collect the data and show live muscle activation, fatigue, and intensity. As Crowder punches against the trainer, they can see body behavior changing in real time. What’s more, is that Crowder can now better identify his body’s limits based on what the sensors tell him. This helps Rey and other coaches understand how Crowder’s body responds to the training to make sure he isn’t overworked.
Data provides an advantage for better training
Rey is able to quantify the data, through the dashboards and visualizations, and provide feedback to Allen as he’s fighting to recognize how his body feels at the point of fatigue. At that point, Allen can change his fighting approach to both optimize his “available resources” and allow his depleted muscles to recover. The ability to connect a quantified event brings the value forward, with the data becoming increasingly crucial for better, more efficient training.
“As a coach, sometimes we think that we haven’t pushed the fighters enough,” said Rey. “If we can get data points where we can see that, that’s a good advantage for training and preparation.”
In addition to the visual results of the fight, data is also collected prior to Crowder’s fight. Rey and other coaches can compare both sets of data to adjust their training moving forward. However, it’s not an exact science; there is a multitude of factors that come into play such as heart rate and stamina level.
Crowder’s heart rate is an example of this data-based training adjustment put into action. With this data, Crowder finds that if he maintains his heart rate at 155, his performance is optimized, compared to a heart rate of 160, when his body starts to breakdown. Crowder finds this a tremendous help to ensure that he stays optimal for as long as possible.
“You don’t want to send a fighter into a fight at 50 percent; you want them to be 100 percent,” said Crowder. “With this data and the information that we can gather and collect, I can make sure that every time… I’m going to be 100 percent.”
Follow Crowder on Twitter at @AllenCrowder6, on Instagram at @allen_prettyboy or pb_crowder, or on Facebook.