AI-Powered Experience for Spotfire

Thanks to TIBCO for inviting me to TIBCO NOW 2018 where they made several announcements. In talking with Bob Eve, Senior Director of Analytics at TIBCO and Keith Woodie, System Engineer Consultant and Dan Hudson, V.P. Senior Manager Systems Integration at First Citizens Bank, they believe the DZone community will be most interested in the introduction of TIBCO Spotfire X.

Spotfire X is an AI-driven analytics experience that integrates agile data exploration with natural language processing (NLP), machine learning recommendations, and model-based authoring, adding native support for real-time streaming data. This will allow users to humanize their data and information, resulting in making better decisions, faster.

Bob believes this is compelling for developers because Spotfire X has the biggest community of users and you don’t have to be a data scientist to access data. Spotfire X provides access enabling users to do the last three miles of the query journey with visually friendly tools. NLQ (natural language query) abstracts away the five letter German acronyms to enable end users to access data enabling hundreds of people in organizations to create insights that impact business -- "Even when you don’t have the end in mind serendipity comes along."

Keith is excited about Spotfire X because so much of what they do at the bank relies on communicating across the organization and having a strong ROI on their IT projects. He sees Spotfire X as a more focused platform for his business.  "Anything that visualizes and accesses the data is great. All you need is a web browser and your users can interact with Spotfire reports to get the information they need."

The goal with Spotfire X was to harness the power of AI to augment users’ knowledge, magnify their skills, and to simplify and speed decision making. Complementing the product’s point-and-click, agile data exploration, X provides machine-learning-based guidance, recommending data relationships and uncovering patterns for users as they explore. A user can type a request and Spotfire will not only create visualizations, but also make prescriptive suggestions using the results, such as blending data, marking matched records, or launching analytical tools. Click a value, drag a chart, type a question, and Spotfire will deliver a clear response.

Spotfire X will also feature native support for real-time, streaming data from any source. TIBCO Spotfire® Data Streams, a new module, extends the Spotfire platform with 80 streaming sources out of the box, such as the OSIsoft PI software and WITSML for oil and gas; Bloomberg®, Reuters®, and FIX for financial services; and TIBCO® Messaging (including the recently announced support for Apache Kafka® and Eclipse Mosquitto™), Apache Spark™ Streaming, and others for IoT. Streaming data can be explored like any other data and can be linked to historical data for context, root cause, and impact analysis.

Spotfire X will provide:

• Agile Analytics: Reinvents user interface to simplify and speed data exploration.

• Augmented Analytics: Natural language search and AI deliver instant insights.

• Automated Analytics: Automatically recorded dataflows make it easy to amend, author, and audit data lineage.

• Accelerated Analytics: Real-time visual analytics on data streams enable real-time actions and awareness.

“Companies around the world have more than enough graphs and charts; what they are searching for is faster insight and better decision-making,” said Brad Hopper, Vice President, Analytics Product Strategy, TIBCO. “We started investing in AI-driven recommendations several years ago, and we are very excited that we have both simplified the practice and increased the power of exploring data. Business users just getting started can nevertheless make important discoveries, and experienced analysts can get their results even faster. We believe the A(X) Experience will help companies get more return from their investments in people and data.” 

The ease of use of Spotfire X will lead to faster insights and make analytics even more accessible to innovative organizations.