Intelligent solutions

Mark Lorian of TIBCO Spotfire discusses the latest developments in business intelligence solutions.

“If empowering business users to measure, monitor and manage business performance is the end game for BI, then analytics is an area where vendors and organisations must excel.”
-Mark Lorian

How does TIBCO Spotfire different from other business intelligence (BI) solutions?

ML. TIBCO Spotfire allows organisations to equip every employee to quickly discover new insights in the information they work with every day.  Unlike traditional BI, TIBCO Spotfire software shifts the power to ask and answer virtually unconstrained questions to front-line business users – the people who make decisions every day – without requiring countless new reports or custom queries from IT.  This type of speed and flexibility is difficult to achieve quickly with traditional BI solutions. Specifically, no other vendor combines five key elements – clarity of visualisation, freedom of spreadsheets, relevance of applications, confidence of statistics, and reach of reports – in a single user experience.

Many BI vendors are now focusing on analytics. Can you explain this shift?

ML. Although BI tools are becoming somewhat easier to use, they remain a challenge for most non-technical employees, especially if the suites require deep knowledge of underlying data models, schema and metadata. If BI enables quick, daily business decisions on issues such as allocating resources and inventory, users shouldn’t be forced to waste time sifting through irrelevant data for answers.  Analytics takes the user’s role and responsibilities into account, serving as a key ingredient in a company’s business strategy by driving innovation, competitive advantage, and fact-based decision-making.  If empowering business users to measure, monitor and manage business performance is the end game for BI, then analytics is an area where vendors and organisations must excel.

What is driving the business need for analytics?

ML. During good times there is often enough slack in the system to allow bad decisions (or missed opportunities) to be forgiven or even to pass unnoticed.  But when times are tough, a bad decision or missed opportunity can mean the end of your business.  There is huge pressure to make better, more informed decisions and to drive businesses in innovative ways to combat rapidly changing markets. This tells us that, even when times are hard, there are opportunities to be found; the trick is to find them. That’s where analytics comes in.  TIBCO Spotfire products are fast and flexible, allowing companies to ask new questions immediately and find new insights.  Our customers, industry leaders among the Global 2000 – including Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Toshiba and Texas Instruments – have deployed the TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform to gain an information advantage over their competitors.  Using our solution, customers have made new discoveries, solved costly manufacturing problems, and improved sales performance.

TIBCO recently announced TIBCO Spotfire 3.1. What features does it offer that distinguish it from other offerings on the market?

ML. Unlike traditional BI tools, which for the most part aggregate historical trends only, Spotfire 3.1 projects them forward with what-if scenarios. Anyone in the company can ask questions on demand and our analytics will provide future predictions based on behind-the-scenes data-driven methods. As a result, predictive modeling – long the mainstay of statisticians and vacant from traditional BI applications – is now available to all business professionals in any business process.  By combining the power of S+ and R tools with the Spotfire Enterprise Analytics platform, customers get a rapid prototyping environment for analytic applications that combines highly interactive, exploratory analysis with the power of statistical and predictive modeling.  Users can then share their interactive analyses, including guided workflows, via a local library or web-based application.

ML: For a free trial of TIBCO Spotfire visit: http://spotfire.tibco.com/eval.  To view interactive demos of TIBCO Spotfire, visit: http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos.

Biography

Mark Lorion,  Vice President of Marketing, joined TIBCO Software Inc in 2007 as part of TIBCO’s acquisition of Spotfire, Inc.  In his current role, he is responsible for product marketing, field marketing, marketing communications and overall go to market strategies for the Spotfire product line at TIBCO.   Before joining Spotfire, Lorian led marketing at PeerDirect Corporation, where he helped re-launch the company following its acquisition by Progress Software. He earned his MBA with honours from the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College and a degree in Economics from Syracuse University.