Spotfire | The TIBCO Blog

How One Company Uses Data Visualization To Enable Their Customers

May 15, 2013 by Kevin Jordan Leave a Comment

We all know becoming a real expert takes years of hard work and dedication. People say the ability to teach a subject leads to real mastery, yet although we value highly skilled teachers, businesses do not have time, resources or patience to pour into any one individual’s growth. We still demand the highest level of expertise in consultations, but faster and cheaper.

Data experts, “data scientists,” used to be hard to find because of the time it took to truly master the art of data analysis. Years of schooling and training in statistics are necessary to make full sense of complex and growing data. When a business asks for advice based on data, scientists must put learned information into context by taking into account industry, geography, and the specific market dynamics. With so many moving parts to consider, relying on only a few “experts” can be painstakingly time-consuming, and costly. [Read more...]

Data As Art Created By Scientists

May 4, 2013 by Laura Lau 1 Comment

Whether it’s infographics, maps, flow charts, or other design-driven diagrams, data visualization is now seen as the preferred way to interact with data. In fact, infographics and other visualizations have been some of the most shared images in social media history. Why? They’re easy to understand, quick, and beautiful. They engage.

These visuals are important, but the ability for businesses to go the next step and make actionable decisions based on predictive visual analytics allows them to stay ahead of the competition. With the amount of data being collected all around the world, new and interesting pieces of data are being uncovered all the time, demanding the need for analytic sophistication. Companies need to go beyond what is just there visually and interact with predictive models in order to get true value out of their decisions.

Data as Art

In a world where many of us scroll through dry spreadsheets and presentations filled with stale clip art, beautiful data is a sight for sore eyes. Data visualization has been a powerful tool for marketers and journalists with infographic designers charging between $1,000-$10,000 for an engaging, sharable piece of data art. But while companies are investing in designers to drive engagement externally, how many companies are using our appetite for data visualization to drive change with its tough audience – its internal one? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire Tagged With: Big Data, data analytics, hbr, infographics, ROI, visual analytics

Are You Intimidated By Big Data?

April 14, 2013 by Kevin Jordan Leave a Comment

People do not often think of data points as having dire consequences, but it could mean the life and death of a business. In every realm of business and sector of life from politics, economics, society, the environment, to technology, there are big data complications. Without the blend of analytics and integration solutions, there are growing risks of security threats, need for efficiency and cost reductions, and a desire for more collaboration. Big data is not just big because companies and organizations collect large volumes of it, but also because it has real and lasting implications on everyone.

Energizing for Energy Data

Take Energy and Petroleum (E&P) companies as an example. It is not just their responsibility to make a profit – that is the end game of the business. It is also their responsibility to leverage their data that could result in political action for cleaner air, a more green environment, and even a healthier and safer lifestyle for every person and living thing on the planet. With big data comes big responsibility.

“Data contributes between a quarter and a third of the total value generated each year by all the activities of a typical E&P company.”

-Value of Data Management, study conducted by Schlumberger and commissioned by Common Data Access Ltd. (CDA) [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Integration, Spotfire Tagged With: analytics, Big Data, CEP, complex event processing, data analytics, Energy, energy and petroleum, integration, Spotfire

Every Day on Your Way to Work, You Are Using Real-Time Analysis of Big Data

April 11, 2013 by Sean O'Shaughnessey 1 Comment

I frequently discuss big data with executives from some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the US. I continually act as a sounding board for their frustration as they try to extract value from historical big data. There is a prevalent misbelief among them that there is a great deal of value in years and countless rows of data, but they struggle to monetize this hidden value, and for good reason.

Their concern is valid. Investing millions on clusters of servers with little return on investment is simply not acceptable in these demanding financial times, nor should it ever be. The adage that a data warehouse can just as easily be called a data cemetery is valid in many cases, even for the largest corporations in the world.

Don’t Play Games With Big Data, Learn the Rules First

April 9, 2013 by Louis Bajuk-Yorgan Leave a Comment

Visual analytics solutions need to go a step further than just understanding historical data-at-rest, in order to go from good from great. It is not enough to just understand data at high level — you need to correlate the relevant data and act on it. With the right solution, a company has the capabilities to concentrate on what is most relevant in data, visualize it, draw meaningful relationships and then automatically act on what is most important. This automated action allows a business to leverage the real power of predictive analytics.

Companies want to make sense of the data they have and leverage predictive analytics in their business. The problem is there are no prepackaged set of rules that come along with the mountains of data. Integrated Big Data allows for companies to develop a set of rules and make actionable decisions based on trends and correlations from data about what is currently happening and what is likely to happen in the future. Monopoly might be the game of enterprise domination, but for big data, integration is the biggest game in town. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Integration, Spotfire Tagged With: analytics, Big Data, data analytics, integrated systems, integration, Predictive Analytics, spotifre, visual analytics

Cool News: Customer Feedback Moves TIBCO Spotfire to Gartner Leader Quadrant for 2013

February 8, 2013 by Spotfire Blogging Team 1 Comment

What moved Spotfire to a Leaders position in the 2013 Business Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant from Gartner, Inc.?

While you’ll need to review the entire report to see all the details, we can share a few highlights and insights as to why Spotfire customer feedback helped move the product into the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant Leaders category.

First, it’s important to know how the survey works. Gartner defines vendors in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant as having “a software platform that delivers 15 capabilities across three categories: integration, delivery and analysis.”

Gartner surveyed just over 1,700 current business intelligence and analytics platforms in late 2012 to compile the Magic Quadrant (MQ) report.

Second, it’s important to note how critical this report is in the decision-making process when companies are selecting business intelligence or data discovery vendors.

Because it’s based on customer surveys, vendor surveys and client inquiries to Gartner, decision makers view the report as an important tool in the final decision-making process. Gartner uses this tool to give enterprises a broader view of the industry and the top players in it.

Customer survey data is a key factor for Gartner’s ranking. The direct feedback from customers helped drive Spotfire into the Leaders category.

So, now that we’ve explained how the report is compiled and used, here’s an overview of what helped move Spotfire’s data discovery software to the Leaders category. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Tech Trends Tagged With: Analytics and Optimization, Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant Leader, data discovery, Gartner, Magic Quadrant, MQ, Spotfire

Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery and The Cure for Big Data

January 9, 2013 by Kevin Jordan 2 Comments

Pharmaceutical drug discovery can become highly problematic when a company has over a decade worth of test data that needs to be analyzed. How can you expect to visualize 10 years of pharmaceutical test data all at once? Allergan does it everyday. All around the world, whenever people come together for holidays, festivities, and just gatherings of friends and family they unintentionally bring an uninvited guest. Sicknesses and illnesses do not take holidays and get passed on at higher rates when people come together. It’s the work of pharmaceutical companies like Allergan to work year-round to keep people as safe and healthy as possible.

Allergan is a global specialty pharmaceutical company employing more than 9,000 people worldwide at world-class discovery and development facilities, as well as state-of-the-art manufacturing plants. Even the best pharmaceutical companies need the occasional [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Transform Tagged With: Allergan, analytics, Big Data, Big Data Analytics, Innovation, innovation series, pharma, pharmaceuticals, Spotfire, visualization

NFU Mutual Automates Paper Processes with TIBCO Solutions

November 13, 2012 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Business process improvement initiatives can yield efficiencies that have a direct impact on the bottom line. For NFU Mutual, the decision to automate its paper-based claim processing workflow is already starting to bear fruit. Whereas before, supervisors would distribute the incoming paper claims manually, the steps behind NFU’s claims processing are now orchestrated by TIBCO BPM solutions, and incoming claims are being automatically allocated to its agents. The system is smart enough to know when to route the claims to other offices if a particular office is swamped by high volumes of claims triggered, say, by a local disaster.

Since implementation, NFU has seen improved efficiencies, including a reduction of some 4,000 paper files, which in turn has freed up office space. Meanwhile, supervisors are free to focus on high-value assignments rather than allocate claims to employees, and backlogs are minimized as claims are being routed to offices with lighter loads. NFU Mutual is using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO Nimbus and TIBCO Spotfire to optimize its claims-handling process.

For more, check out this feature article in Computerweekly.com.

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Automation, BPM, Nimbus, SOA, Spotfire Tagged With: ActiveMatrix, NFU, NFU Mutual, Nimbus, Nimbus Control

Data Analysis: Tracking Tornadoes, Terrorists and Bombs

October 29, 2012 by Spotfire Blogging Team Leave a Comment

Increasingly, federal agencies are tapping the power of big data and analytics to better perform a myriad of tasks, including predicting killer tornadoes, thwarting terrorist operations and disrupting the networks in Iraq and Afghanistan that build improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

As most of the East Coast hunkers down and braces for Hurricane Sandy, what better time to tell you how federal data scientists are using data analysis to track weather events, among other things?

For example, the National Weather Service is combining big data streaming in from its satellites with automated weather services to create models that are aimed at identifying potential tornadoes quickly enough so that the public can be warned.

“It used to be that weather reports came from weather stations,” says Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “Now, there are all sorts of automated services. Computers can digest the data, and they can make the models look like the real atmosphere.”

The agency’s weather forecasting approach could be a model for other federal agencies that are developing their own prediction models, Carbin notes.

For example, he suggests that the Federal Reserve Board could use the method for analyzing long-term economic data. The NWS model is sensitive to external data sources like fluctuating economic news, he adds. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Big Data, Big Data Analytics, Data Mining, Data Scientist

Closing the Big Data Loop

October 19, 2012 by Chris Taylor Leave a Comment

It has been two weeks since TUCON 2012, the TIBCO user conference held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. TIBCO is well-known as an integration company but used the event to demonstrate its broad platform approach to the biggest challenges of today, like digital customer experience, loyalty, and the topic of this article, Big Data.

The TIBCO CTO, Matt Quinn spoke about the patterns hiding within the rapidly increasing amounts of data flowing across the enterprise. Quinn made an important distinction between data at rest, information sitting in databases or flat files waiting to be queried, and data in motion, which includes streaming data and data stored in-memory (also known as cache).

Quinn made the point that it takes analytics like those offered within TIBCO’s Spotfire product to be able to see what would be invisible to people trying to keep up with the increasing deluge of information. To Quinn, the smart enterprise finds patterns in historical and machine data (log files that up until recently weren’t mined for patterns) that provide insight that can be applied to data that’s coming at today’s “full speed.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: BPM, CEP, Cloud, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, MDM, SOA, Social, Spotfire Tagged With: analytics, application development, Big Data, Hadoop, Matt Quinn, Patterns, Spotfire

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