Tibco has launched a business intelligence tool designed for the small business market that it is making available for free over the next year.
TibcoSilver Spotfire is part of Tibco’s effort to appeal to a community that would not normally have access to its robust business intelligence technology. These are people who understand social technologies and may find the service appealing for what it can do that spreadsheets do not.
You can download the app and launch it but as far as we can tell it’s only for Windows users.
Known for its data visualization, Tibco is offering a similar capability with its cloud based tool. You can tell they want Tibco to be a tool that anyone can use. They even pull out Roger Craig, the former San Franciso 49ers running back to make a pitch. Craig now works in business development for Tibco.
At its core, Tibco is a hard core business intelligence technology company.
A data analyst from Procter & Gamble we spoke with recently said that Tibco is what they consider the premiere service for data analytics. Tibco recently announced what it calls the two-second advantage.
Tibco decouples data from the database to create a high-speed architecture. They essentially attack the problem at the software infrastructure level to gain what it calls “two second advantage.” Tibco claims this two-second advantage means it can deliver the right information, at the right with the right context. Analysts call Tibco one of the dark horses in the enterprise software market.
Industry analyst Merv Adrian:
“Spotfire has had a “visionary” reputation for some time now (Gartner has recognized it as such in Magic Quadrant research), and Tibco has steadily grown its market share, though like other portfolio software vendors, it is unwilling to break individual product numbers out for a clear comparison. Its strong visualization, powerful statistical engine, and in-memory performance focus (with load balancing in the server in its latest release) have extended its reputation. Spotfire also leverages Tibco’s long experience with event processing to provide context-aware features that have driven continued expansion. Silver Spotfire confirms its preference for the visionary play with an authoring client, and web-based sharing and hosting that will be available for a monthly fee after the trial.”
Tibco competes against companies like SAS, IBM, SAP, Oracle and a number of startups such as Crowdcast. Analytics are the hot category this summer. We expect to see more services like the Tibco cloud environment as more companies seek new customers with an understanding of business intelligence and its advantages over spreadsheets.
