Tibco updates Silver Spotfire 2.0 with tailored BI reporting

Tibco has updated its business intelligence software-as-a-service portfolio with Silver Spotfire 2.0, which boasts self-service capabilities and templates to help business users make better decisions.

As with the first edition of Silver Spotfire released in July last year, the suite offers tiered capabilities and scalability so that solutions can be tailored to the level of reporting or analysis an organisation needs.

Lou Jordano, director of product marketing at Tibco, told V3 that the company will continue to focus on consumer-type enhancements to the application.

"It's a consumer offering so it needs to be simple and easy to purchase and use. It's aimed at professionals like finance executives who don't have IT budgets, analyst budgets or programming skills," he said.

The latest version offers an online community of support where customers can put questions to others using the service.

Additionally, several templates have been added to the suite to help make business decisions after comparing a number of options.

"We've developed the templates so people don't have to start with a blank slate. For example, there is a budget versus an actual expenses one," said Jordano.

The templates pull information from the web to help customers make comparisons on, for example, what mobile phone they should use.

"Essentially it helps people gain insight into the unseen," Jordano said.

Tibco's launch of Silver Spotfire was a move away from static databases and reports, designed to democratise the use of business intelligence in the enterprise by allowing anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports via the cloud.

Tibco Silver Spotfire enables business teams to build and share reports, dashboards and charts, and perform other visualisation and calculation tasks to create a "robust analytics" knowledge base, the firm said.

The tool can be integrated with social media to distribute analytical knowledge by embedding live dashboards into business blogs and online articles.