In 2012, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were produced each day. Much of it has the potential to guide corporations and businesses to improve the offered services and to better focus on customer satisfaction by helping to understand behaviors and patterns, to identify and minimize waste, and to have process visibility. However, the analysis of such large chunks of data, known as Big Data, is a huge challenge for the IT world, and only recently have hardware and software started to offer options for such burdensome tasks.
Visual Analytics tools rose as a partial solution for this complex Big Data problem, allowing humans to have a better insight into their owned data. The TIBCO Spotfire platform is one of the pioneers of this world, very well known as a reference in the market. This platform is a leader in both Gartner 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms and Forrester WaveTM: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q1 2013.
Unfortunately, there are few publications about such an essential tool, whether from TIBCO or others. This book is an opportunity to challenge this fact. I hope it not only fulfills its purpose as a fast-paced introduction to the platform, but also serves as a trigger for the publication of more TIBCO software books.
I sincerely hope the chosen topics and content simplicity make this book mandatory reading for anyone wishing to triumph with such a fabulous tool, and I wish all readers may reach the end of the book with a positive outlook and with enough knowledge to embrace new challenges in the world of TIBCO Spotfire.
Chapter 1, The Spotfire Architecture Overview introduces the Spotfire Platform products, defining their independent roles in the platform's architecture. The platform's main features are also described in this chapter.
Chapter 2, Setting Up a Development Environment covers the installation pre-requisites, the installation process, and the post-installation tasks for the creation of a local standalone environment, with the capability for creation and deployment of meaningful visualizations.
Chapter 3, Creating Visualizations details the processes of loading external data in the Spotfire Platform and of creating visualizations. Several visualization types are presented, such as Bar Chart, Pie Chart, and Scatter Plot.
Chapter 4, Mastering Visualizations deepens the knowledge of the previous chapter, by introducing the concepts of filtering, data preparation and transformation, and libraries. This chapter closes with an introduction to the displaying of visualizations through Spotfire Web Player Server.