Tibco Launches Spotfire 7 Analytics Platform

Tibco Software has announced the general availability of Spotfire 7, the company’s latest analytics and data visualization platform to help make analytics accessible to all members of an organization.

Spotfire 7 is designed to be user-friendly, the company noted, with built-in features including customizable dashboards and data visualization tools to help novices analyze data quickly and easily. Version 7 includes a new Recommendations feature, which utilizes “smart” analytics combined with visual representations of data so beginners can understand what they are seeing. The new platform also includes several streamlined features to speed up the data-exploration experience, according to the announcement.

“Our goal with Spotfire 7 is to make analytics software easier to use and to drive insights for everyday users faster than ever before,” said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and general manager for Tibco Analytics, in a statement. “Our platform-focused approach and focus on power with ease-of-use takes analytics out of the tool and puts it into the conversation, enabling business users and data scientists to become even more capable.”

With Recommendations, Spotfire 7 will be able to help novices pick and choose best practices via data visualizations, while experts will be able to utilize the wizard to quickly create dashboards of interconnected visualizations, according to Tibco. Spotfire 7 also features streamlined user interface elements for faster data discovery and a new set of style options to customize individual workspaces to fit the audience and type of data being consumed.

By focusing on making data analytics a simpler task for the everyday worker, Tibco has developed a similar offering to IBM’s recent Watson Analytics service, according to V3. And by giving users an easy to access platform, Tibco believes it can free up data scientists to work on more complex tasks.

“[Data scientists] need to be freed up to answer the really hard problems and come up with suitable models rather than support the everyday running of the business,” said Steve Farr, industry analytics director at Tibco, in an interview with V3. “So Recommendations is the first step behind helping everybody be confident in their analysis.”