Tibco Spotfire update enables direct actions from dashboards

New in Spotfire 

Traditionally, data consumers do the analysis that leads to data-informed decisions within their BI environments. Then, to take action based on those decisions, they leave their BI environments and go into a different application.

Often, those actions have to be done repeatedly, and that requires repeated toggling among BI environments and other work applications.

Recently, however, there has been a movement among analytics vendors to connect BI tools to other work applications so users don't have to leave one environment for another. And when actions can be repeated, tools now enable users to automate those actions from their BI environment

For example, Tableau unveiled an integration with Salesforce -- Tableau's parent company -- in late 2022 that enables customers to connect dashboards to work applications and automate actions. Similarly, Qlik built in automation capabilities as part of its ethos of "active intelligence."

Tibco first introduced the concept of taking action directly from Spotfire when it previewed Spotfire 12 during its Analytics Forum, a virtual user conference in June 2022.

Nine months later, the vendor is making the capability generally available.

With Cloud Actions, Spotfire integrates capabilities from Tibco Cloud to create a low-code/no-code tool so users can trigger actions in both cloud and on-premises applications, including operational systems and databases.

Customers don't want insights to end with reports and dashboards that are disconnected from the apps where people take action and get work done. It's about seizing the moment and not having to waste time navigating and switching between separate environments.

Ultimately, the benefit is a smoother workflow and reduced time -- and effort -- between insight and action, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.

"I've long been a proponent of driving insights into action, and leading analytics/BI vendors have been pushing in this direction," he said. "Customers don't want insights to end with reports and dashboards that are disconnected from the apps where people take action and get work done. It's about seizing the moment and not having to waste time navigating and switching between separate environments."

One potential use case for Cloud Actions is anomaly detection, explained Matt Quinn, Tibco's general manager.

If a user detects an anomaly that is not being detected by his or her system or requires work beyond what their system is programmed to do, they can create a custom action in Spotfire that triggers another application to take that action.

Automation of repeated actions, however, is where Cloud Actions truly saves users time and effort, Quinn continued.

"The one thing we wanted to do was complete the circle and make sure that, from within Spotfire, you could effectively issue actions," he said. "You can do human-oriented actions, but this was really designed for automation."

Additional capabilities

Beyond Spotfire 12.2, Tibco also launched updated versions of Streaming and Data Science.

Streaming -- Tibco's platform for applications that continuously ingest, query and act on data in real time -- now includes what the vendor terms dynamic learning.

The capability essentially enables users to do machine learning with streaming data as it gets ingested.

Dynamic learning takes advantage of some of the same technology used to fuel Spotfire recommendations. It automatically analyzes streaming data then, based on what it has learned, it automates data management and analytic model calculations on real-time events, including integrating the streaming data with historical data.

In keeping with Tibco's ethos of Hyperconverged Analytics, while the data ingestion and integration tasks are automatically performed in Streaming, users view the information provided by Streaming within Spotfire.

And as with Cloud Actions in Spotfire, the primary benefit of dynamic learning is greater efficiency, according to Henschen.

"Streaming is all about monitoring and responding to fast-moving environments, so all the better if this system can dynamically learn from the choices and changes that are made," he said. "This new ability to learn … saves time and human effort that would otherwise be required to adapt the system to changes in underlying data sources, systems and business expectations."

Data Science, meanwhile, now includes a new Apache Spark 2 workflow engine aimed at improving performance as well as more interoperability with Spotfire and Data Virtualization so users can build and train models with Spotfire's interface.

"It's about promoting use of the entire Tibco portfolio -- each component can still stand on its own, but [Tibco is] adding value for customers that use multiple offerings," Henschen said.

That interoperability, meanwhile, is fundamental to all the new capabilities Tibco launched on Tuesday, according to Quinn.

He noted that Spotfire is the main access point for all of Tibco users' data management and analytics needs. And the more the vendor can bring capabilities from other Tibco tools into Spotfire -- and the more seamlessly it can integrate Spotfire with other Tibco capabilities to create an ecosystem -- the easier and more efficient it makes the vendor's entire suite of capabilities.

"People are not seeing the streaming work, Data Virtualization, the work we do with geoanalytics and what we do with statistical analysis as separate things," Quinn said. "It's part of what they do. The further we can integrate those products together in a seamless experience, the more power it gives users without them having to learn individual new products."

Future plans

With Cloud Actions as well as new capabilities in Streaming and Data Science now available, Tibco has an aggressive roadmap.

Product development plans include adding more cloud nativity; tighter integration between platform components -- in particular with Spotfire; making the platform more customizable with Mods; and furthering the ecosystem with connectors to external data sources, according to Quinn.

But one major initiative will be to make Tibco's tools easier to use.

Unlike some vendors' platforms that are designed around ease of use and intended for self-service data consumers, Tibco's analytics tools aim to enable deep data science work. The vendor's target user generally has more knowledge of computer science and statistics than users of many other analytics platforms.

Nevertheless, Spotfire could be more user-friendly, according to Quinn. But rather than reduce the complexity, Tibco plans to use AI -- including perhaps ChatGPT or other large language models -- to provide more help.

"Spotfire is a tool for experts -- that's its market," Quinn said. "We set the bar pretty high, and that sometimes means it's not as easy to use as it should be. We're doing a lot of work to add in helpers and assistants throughout the product. We don't want to dumb down the product, but we can provide more assistance to get users where they need to go, especially new users."

Henschen, meanwhile, said he'd like Tibco to expand the options for Spotfire Cloud deployment.

He noted that Spotfire Cloud is available as a service on AWS but not the other major clouds. 

"Times have changed, and more and more companies are choosing SaaS-based analytics/BI offerings and other managed services," Henschen said. "Quite a few independent analytics/BI vendors now offer SaaS services on more than one cloud. Tibco manages one-off Spotfire deployments for customers on many clouds and on-premises data centers, but I wouldn't mind seeing another SaaS option."

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and is a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.