Tibco makes BI move with Spotfire purchase

Tibco Software is to acquire business intelligence (BI) firm Spotfire in a $195m deal that extends the middleware giant’s reach beyond integration.

The deal will complement Tibco’s efforts to provide an event-driven infrastructure that helps customers make real-time decisions, and will help Tibco compete against rivals’ proprietary stacks, the firm said.

Although Oracle recently agreed a deal to purchase Hyperion, Tibco said the Spotfire purchase would give it a different kind of capability to that gleaned from traditional BI.

“Spotfire’s focus has been on a rich user interface so users can ask ad-hoc questions,” said Jeff Kristick, Tibco senior director of product marketing. “Most of the BI vendors have no idea what real-time really means, they take transactional sources and ETL [extract, transform, load] them out to build a data mart. But they don’t know anything about a service bus.”

Tibco’s plan is to maintain the Spotfire brand and separate business unit but to integrate the BI server capabilities over time with Tibco’s tools.

Although Spotfire has a .Net client and Tibco is a Java-orientated firm, Spotfire has plans for a new Ajax-based browser client that would offer a rich web front-end.

The Spotfire acquisition is due to complete by September at the latest.

See also:

Business Objects to acquire Cartesis

BI giant continues push into BPM market with acquisition of former rival  23 Apr 2007

Oracle tackles Hyperion integration doubts

Oracle insists that Hyperion's portfolio is very compatible with its own  05 Mar 2007

Spotfire to bolster BI usability

New suite makes it easier for users to spot patterns within data  16 Jan 2007

Tibco plans open SOA deployment

ActiveMatrix offers language-neutral approach  07 Dec 2006

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