Enterprise software provider Tibco is releasing a new version of its data visualization and analytics platform, Spotfire 12.2, with new features that focus on aiding developers and bolstering the software's ability to act as an end-to-end system combining data science, streaming, and data management tools.
“With the new release of Spotfire, we are able to combine databases, data science, streaming, real-time analytics and data management, giving Tibco Cloud the capability of an end-to-end platform,” said Michael O’Connell, chief analytics officer at Tibco.
The update, released Tuesday, comes with Tibco's Cloud Actions, which enables business users to take actions directly from within the business insights windowe, according to O’Connell.
“New Tibco Spotfire Cloud Actions bridge the gap between insight and decision. This no-code capability for writing transactions to any cloud or on-premise application allows you to take action across countless operational systems, spanning all of today’s top enterprise business applications and databases,” the company said in a blog post.
This is made possible by Tibco Cloud Integration, which is an integration platform-as-a-service offered by the company over cloud infrastructure. Cloud Integration supports traditional iPaaS use cases and is optimized for REST-based and API use cases, Tibco said, adding that it offers over 800 operating system connectors and works with databases such as Dynamics 365, Amazon Redshift, Google Analytics, Magneto and MySQL connector.
Business users can also use Tibco Cloud Live Apps, which is a no-code interface, to create and automate manual workflows, to enable Cloud Actions, the company said.
Spotfire triggers actions, automation in other apps
Spotfire’s Cloud Actions, according to Constellation Research principal analyst Doug Henschen, enables Spotfire users to harness insights and set criteria that, when met, trigger actions and automation within other apps.
“Customers don’t want insights to end with reports and dashboards that are disconnected from the apps and platforms where people take action and get work done,” Henschen said, adding that leading vendors have been pushing to drive insights into action with workflow and automation options, whereby alerts as well as human and automated triggers can be used to kick off actions and business processes within external systems.
In addition to Cloud Actions, the company is offering data visualization modifications, dubbed mods, which are developed by Tibco and its community of users.
These modifications offer nuanced and different views to generate more insights, the company said, with Connell adding that they can be downloaded from the company website and other community sites.
In addition, the Tibco Community capability, according to the company, provides galleries of prebuilt mods visualizations, data functions, and Cloud Actions grab-and-go templates, offering point-and-click deployment.
Tibco Streaming, Data Science offer growth opportunities
As part of the 12.2 update, Tibco is also offering new features as part of its Tibco Streaming and Tibco Data Science’s Team Studio.
Tibco Streaming now comes with dynamic learning, which analyzes streaming data to automate data management and analytics calculations for real-time events, merging historical and streaming data as part of the same analysis, the company said.
This, according to Tibco, enables business intelligence to expand into low-latency operational use cases, such as IoT and edge sensors, with Spotfire serving as the control and decision hub.
On the data science side, Tibco has updated its Team Studio to include a new Apache Spark 3 workflow engine to improve performance.
The performance improvement is made possible by a new operator framework that merges core and custom operators, enabling workflows to execute as a single Spark application, the company said.
Data Virtualization enables AI model training
In addition, the company has updated its Tibco Data Virtualization offering, allowing users to control Team Studio data preparation and do AI and analytics model training and inferencing at scale from within the Spotfire interface.
“End user applications can train models, make predictions, summarize data, and apply data science techniques, in context of the business problem at hand,” the company said.
Tibco Data Science’s Team Studio and Tibco Streaming will not only allow the company to offer end-to-end services with Tibco Cloud but also unfurl growth opportunities for the company, analysts said.
Tibco Data Science is about developing and deploying predictive models and managing their complete life cycle, according to Henschen.
“The Team Studio component of Data Science and the integrations with Spotfire and other tools are about making those predictive capabilities accessible to non-data-scientists so they can take proactive action,” Henschen said.
The demand for Tibco’s data science tools and streaming, according to Ventana Research’s David Menninger, will see an increase as more and more business processes involve real time analyses.
“The only way to keep up with real time processes is with AI and machine learning. You can’t expect someone to be monitoring a dashboard in real time to determine what the best action is for the current situation. These decisions need to be made algorithmically and that’s were data science comes in,” Menninger said.
Tibco, according to market research firm IDC, competes with companies including Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik, IBM and Oracle in the business intelligence market.
Tibco has captured just 1.22% of the market, with installations in 8,160 companies, according to market research firm Enlyft.
The research firm lists Tableau and Microsoft Power BI as the market leaders, with 17% and 14% market share, respectively.