Tibco launches Spotfire 4.0 with Microsoft SharePoint integration

Tibco has launched the latest version of its business intelligence (BI) and analytics software, boasting new predictive forecasting capabilities and integration with Microsoft SharePoint.

Spotfire 4.0 includes an overhaul to the dashboard allowing customers to drill down into different business details and predictive scenarios from just one view, according to the firm.

"The dashboard now brings in predictive and interactive capabilities," Christian Marcazzo, Tibco's director of life sciences, told V3.

"Customers will have one view that solves the use cases of many different traditional dashboards, so from this one place they will be able to answer a range of questions, from those that refer to the performance and results of the business to those that refer to particular products or specific geographies."

Marcazzo explained that the Spotfire dashboard also now integrates predictive capabilities.

"The dashboard will show a sales forecast rather than just the business' previous quarterly results," he said.

"I could compare the dashboards still used by many people as similar to the ones I learnt how to drive with in the old Beetle, but the new Spotfire dashboard is like a modern car. It will tell you what route to take, depending on traffic."

Spotfire 4.0 also has been updated to integrate with Tibco's Tibbr social media platform as well as Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software.

"The integration will allow a product developer to see a pattern in some data and ask the chief executive using Tibbr or SharePoint whether the pattern is significant," said Marcazzo.

"The executive can then interact with the graph from the social network to see what is driving the trend and then send answers back to the product developer."

Sportfire 4.0 will be released sometime later this month.

Tibco released the updated Silver Spotfire 2.0 BI software-as-a-service portfolio in September, adding self-service capabilities and templates to help business users make better decisions.