We are happy to announce today that Spotfire has joined the TIBCO family.

The problem?
I am a traditional BI user. I am continually confronted with the eternal cycle of having to provide requirements for all my analytic needs in advance. Then we go through the inevitable discovery meetings and project meetings, with IT, fine-tuning the reports. As always in business, things change–parameters change, data changes. Guess what…(sigh!)…we are back to the drawing board, and I can hope to get another set of canned reports in 3 or 6 months.

What we wanted to do
We’ve always believed that this was not the right way to go about this business. People need a way to ask questions and change their parameters on the fly as requirements change. All of you Excel Power users know exactly what I mean. Remember how long it takes to master those macros!

I needed something I could use within 30 minutes of my introduction to the software, and something that could do ad hoc queries. I needed something that visualizes the answers I seek, but that would also enable me to play with “what if’” parameters to provide insights. Most important, if we were able to connect the analytics tool to TIBCO’s real-time infrastructure–and folks had access in real time to events and processes as they happened–we would truly have a new way of looking at and analyzing information.  

Why Spotfire?
We spent a lot of time this last year analyzing and looking at Next-Gen BI companies. When Mike Magaro, our VP of Corporate Development, appeared one morning in February and suggested I look at the Spotfire demo, I knew this was it. Now a few months later, we are poised to deliver on the vision I outlined earlier. This is enterprise-class software that goes far beyond any sort of toy office suite sitting on your laptop or brittle BI application that takes a week in class to learn and a few months more to master.

As we went through the mechanics of the merger, we met a bunch of folks who really “got it,” a bunch of world-class customers using Spotfire for things as diverse as asset management, clinical trials analysis, and sales and marketing analytics. We also saw a bunch of smart people clocking 20% plus annual growth. Whether you are a development engineer, a product-line exec, or even a marketing guy, Spotfire’s approach will be appealing and intuitive. We believe we are now in a position to deliver a jolt to traditional analytic approaches and upset the status quo.

We plan on being very disruptive to our competitors, but very helpful to our users. More than 1000 TIBCO customers will learn first-hand this week about Spotfire when they attend TUCON in San Francisco. If you’ve made it to TUCON this year, then welcome! If you’re not in San Francisco this week, then go back to the our Spotfire page learn more about the announcement.

Today we announced that Spotfire, an enterprise analytics platform for next generation business intelligence, is being acquired by TIBCO (NASDAQ: TIBX), a leading supplier of real time infrastructure software.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve built Spotfire to be the leading and most innovative (not so modest!) designer, developer, and supplier of software for finding interesting insights in data – based on an awesome user experience and modular application infrastructure.  Our use of in memory processing, interactive visualizations, ad hoc “free dimensional” queries, and visual workflow development are just a few of the things that help us deliver a radically faster experience that is far more adaptable to different business processes than traditional BI.  Our mission from the beginning has been to give customers an information advantage.  We’ve had the opportunity to work with fantastic customers across the world to make this happen.

Spotfire is at a very exciting point in time – a perfect time to join TIBCO.  I’ve talked in my blog about business intelligence 2.0 and what is driving the change in the market – user experience, speed, interactivity, relevance to business problems, etc. We’ve seen an incredible momentum in the market for this across nearly every type of business.

At the same time we’ve also seen how customers are looking for robust infrastructure as it relates to driving timely data to decisions. The traditional approach which results in a 2 year data warehouse project followed by mountains of static reports emailed out every week just doesn’t work anymore. So it makes a whole lot of sense for us to combine with the team at TIBCO – allowing us integrate our user experience and next-gen BI platform with absolutely the industry’s leading SOA infrastructure. 

Together TIBCO and Spotfire will be able to provide an unprecedented user experience coupled with an infrastructure that can drive data in real time to that user experience.  I believe this will disrupt the BI market as it stands. Think of portfolio managers, sales managers, or manufacturing managers – in fact, anyone! – who need to make critical decisions in a world drowning in data. Now they’ll be able to interact with that data in a real time interactive experience configured for their type of work (their “business process”)!  Who else can do that for you?! (not so modest again!)

I am very excited as you might read into the above text. We will have a lot of fun continuing to build the Spotfire brand and business as part of TIBCO. We will have great opportunities to increase our presence in the market, increase investments in R&D and product development, and of course, leverage the TIBCO product infrastructure to help you create an information advantage for your business.

Looking forward to seeing you in the market place!