The companies of today face innumerable market challenges due to the ferocious competition of a globalized economy. Hence, providing excellent service and having customer loyalty are the priorities for their survival.
In order to best achieve both goals and have a competitive edge, companies can resort to the information generated by their digitalized systems, their IT. All the recorded events from Human Resources (HR) to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Billing, and so on, can be leveraged to better understand the health of a business.
The purpose of this book is to present a tool that behaves as a digital event analysis enabler, the TIBCO Spotfire platform. In this first chapter, we will list the main characteristics of this platform, while also presenting its architecture and describing its components.
Spotfire is a visual analytics and business intelligence platform from TIBCO software. It is a part of new breed of tools created to bridge the gap between the massive amount of data that the corporations produce today and the business users who need to interpret this data in order to have the best foundation for the decisions they make.
In my opinion, there is no better description of what TIBCO Spotfire delivers than the definition of visual analytics made in the publication named Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics.
The TIBCO Spotfire platform offers the possibility of creating very powerful (yet easy to interpret and interact) data visualizations. From real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to Big Data, data-based decision making becomes easy – the what, the why, and the how becomes evident.
Spotfire definitely allowed TIBCO to establish itself in an area where until recently it had very little experience and no sought-after products.
The main features of this platform are:
- More than 30 different data sources to choose from: Several databases (including Big Data Teradata), web services, files, and legacy applications.
- Big Data analysis: Spotfire delivers the power of MapReduce to regular users.
- Database analysis: Data visualizations can be built on top of databases using information links. There is no need to pull the analyzed data into the platform, as a live link is maintained between Spotfire and the database.
- Visual join: Capability of merging data from several distinct sources into a single visualization.
- Rule-based visualizations: The platform enables the creation and tailoring of rules, and the filtering of data. These features facilitate emphasizing of outliers and foster management by exception. It is also possible to highlight other important features, such as commonalities and anomalies.
- Data drill-down: For data visualizations it is possible to create one (or many) details visualization(s). This drill-down can be performed in multiple steps as drill-down of drill-down of drill-down and so on.
- Real-time integration with other TIBCO tools.