The NBA is starting up again. The Boston Celtics have had a great team over the history of the NBA, but in 1980, General Manager “Red” Auerbach, saw an opportunity to put together a solid team like no other. Through shrewd draft picks and a trade, three future Hall of Famers joined the team – Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale.  The men would become known as “The Big Three” because they showed promise to make the Celtics a dominant team again. With these three men, the team won the NBA championship in 1981. Just as the Celtics acquired The Big Three, TIBCO Spotfire helps Allergan, a pharmaceutical company, pursue the ideals of E3: becoming an Event-Enabled Enterprise.

Allergan is a global specialty pharmaceutical company that employs more than 10,000 people worldwide. The company operates world-class discovery and development facilities, as well as state-of-the-art manufacturing plants. Three was not just a magic number for the Celtics or Spotfire. A great team can lead any basketball franchise or pharmaceutical company to success. Allergan and Spotfire are one of these great teams.

Allergan deployed TIBCO Spotfire software as the visual analytics solution to analyze information quickly and perform repeatable analyses. Just as the 1980 Celtics team virtually revolved around The Big Three, Allergan’s overall system architecture revolves around Spotfire Analytics. The solution is designed to handle diverse sets of data in a way that meets the common research needs without intervention.

The Research Informatics Group at Allergan supports the drug discovery effort in relation to medicinal chemistry, biology, and drug safety evaluation. The scientists within the group tasked with predicting the potency of a compound, as well as its efficacy and possible side effects. To perform their research and analyses, the scientists need to relate chemical structures to a wide range of assay results. The Research Informatics Group helps the scientists perform the analyses, but it is very difficult to analyze a large amount of data like this without a graphical visualization technique. Using a tool such as Excel, the scientists could only analyze a few weeks worth of data. Before The Big Three went to the Celtics, the team struggled throughout seasons. Similarly, with Excel, Allergan could not easily make sense of all their data. This led to the company missing insights into their data and lost opportunities. Scientists need to perform analysis quickly because they want to run through their experimentation cycles as many times as they can. The company needed to call a timeout and reconfigure their strategy. Auerbach knew he needed to draft some support for Bird, and Allergan knew they needed to draft in Spotfire.

TIBCO Spotfire software was the answer to the problems they faced. Spotfire provides a highly visual and analyze data in real-time. “Without it we would never be able to help scientists carry out the number of analyses that we currently do,” says Allergan Principal Scientist Robert Cain. Allergan easily earned The Big Three Es and became an Event-Enabled Enterprise with Spotfire’s help.

Read the full story here.