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Trends and Outliers

TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Software Blog

03/15
2010

TIBCO Webcast: Financial Services: Risk Management, Forecasting and Stress Testing

j04331181 150x150 photo (business intelligence)In one of the many unfortunate truths that has accompanied our recent global financial crisis; banks continue to fail.  For those banks and financial institutions that survive, many are finding themselves inadequately capitalized to sustain their ratings or maintain their normal lending operations.  Managing risk and testing stress levels (or “worst-case” scenarios) are a mission critical exercise for banks of all sizes today.

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03/12
2010

Operational + Informational + Collaborative Computing = Enterprise 2.0

j04004223 150x150 photo (business intelligence)There is a deep thinking article over at B-eye-Network on the concept of moving from business intelligence to a “wider world of enterprise architecture.” The author points out a number of drivers that suggest a shift (growth) from business intelligence to a world of fully-connected, real-time, integrated set of information. The article suggests that as we move to a world where, for example, unstructured web data and social media data are added to traditional operational data. This move will drive us to a point where change will demand a new architecture to support, mine, analyze and report on these disparate data sources.

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03/11
2010

Do “Big” Business Intelligence Companies Understand Analytics?

Steve Few photo (business analytics)Do “big” business intelligence companies understand analytics?  Blogger Stephen Few wonders that in a recent posting, “Big BI (Business Intelligence) is Stuck:  Illustrated by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.”

Few makes the case that the larger, older business intelligence vendors haven’t made the transition from building data warehousing solutions to building systems that address “data sense-making.”  He argues “data sense-making (also known as analytics) requires … an approach that leads with design, not engineering, and focuses on people, their needs and abilities, not technology.”  In essence business intelligence is no longer about serving up (or providing access to) data, but about proving a complete solution (people, process and technology) for analytics-based decision-making.

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03/10
2010

Get the Inside Scoop on the Business Intelligence Market

j04431605 150x150 photo (business intelligence)It’s been a busy few weeks in the business intelligence market.  In addition to the TDWI World Conference in mid-February, many vendors in the business intelligence space have held analyst briefings, providing insights into product developments, views on the market and more. 

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03/09
2010

The Pervasiveness of Analytics: The NBA and Metrics

j04307331 150x150 photo (business analytics)We get some interesting hits on our Google alerts for the business intelligence market but this is one that makes sense but wasn’t obvious to us until we read deeper. Check out this article from Basketball Prospectus on the state of APBRmetrics. APBPmetrics is the study of the analysis of basketball through objective evidence. APBRmetircs is a cousin to the study of baseball statistics known as Sabermetrics.

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03/08
2010

Spotfire Named to Datamation’s Ten Leading Business Intelligence Software Companies

j0437059 150x150 photo (business intelligence)Jeff Vance of Datamation recently covered the business intelligence vendor market.  In “Business Intelligence Software: Ten Leaders,” Vance calls the business intelligence software market a “David vs. Goliath” fight between “behemoth” vendors and “pure-play” vendors.

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03/05
2010

‘5 Why’ Can Equal Business Intelligence Through Analytics

j03879381 150x150 photo (business analytics)Only a few years ago, the corporate innovation program at Toyota was profiled in a book titled “The Elegant Solution.”  A key lesson was the ‘5 Why’ practice the company developed to dig deeply into problems – the kind of human analytics that drills down and uncovers underlying causes that might not be understood.

Web analytics guru and Vermont blogger Justin Cutroni suggests asking “Why?” and then questioning the answers received is the whole point of analytics. When the project involves data then it makes sense to segment your data and measure every decision and its results. There’s even a book called “Beautiful Data” about the details behind the quest for elegant solutions.

Taking giant amounts of data and putting it into context should be easy, says Cutroni – who uses Google Analytics and gets results via his iPhone. It’s about action and change and a willingness to try new things, see if they work and to try something else if they don’t turn out as planned.

David Wallace
Spotfire Blogging Team

Image Credit: Microsoft Office Clip Art

03/04
2010

Participate in the Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study

j04431603 150x150 photo (business intelligence)Acclaimed industry expert Howard Dresner has opened the “Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study.”  Dresner’s goal with the study is to provide “an unbiased view of the market to those interested in selecting the best business intelligence vendors and products.”

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03/03
2010

What’s Better Than BI and Smarter than Spreadsheets: TIBCO Spotfire Analytics 3.1

j04464641 150x150 photo (business analytics)Please join us on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11am (EST) for a Webcast on our latest release of TIBCO Spotfire Analytics, v3.1.  TIBCO analytics experts from our product management and marketing teams will discuss the latest release of the Spotfire Analytics platform.

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03/02
2010

Data Analytics About Unlimited Data Use? Call AT&T

j0444368 150x150 photo (business analytics)You already know the 80-20 Rule (80 percent of business profits come from 20 percent of clients).  But what if your company was like AT&T and learned that 3 percent of iPhone customers used 40 percent of your network’s capacity?  How did they find out?  It had to be network data analysis –and its cousin business intelligence.  The culprits were iPhone and other “smartphones” that are constantly trading data packets on the network.  AT&T Mobility reported that in the three years since the iPhone was introduced, data traffic on the company’s network has grown by 5000 percent (nope, not a typo).

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