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

Although Oracle recently agreed a deal to buy Hyperion, Tibco said the Spotfire acquisition will give it a different kind of capability to that of 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 Spitfire brand and separate business unit but to integrate the BI server capabilities over time with Tibco’s integration and business process management 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 will offer a rich web front-end, Tibco’s Kristick added.

“The deal makes a hell of a lot of sense,” said Steve Jones, head of service-oriented architecture (SOA) at Capgemini’s global outsourcing operation. “A lot of the information being generated by SOA is being used to feed data warehouses. The interesting thing is what Tibco is going to do with Spotfire. Spotfire has a lot of interesting ways to view information; is Tibco viewing this as a way to get at information as a portal or moving from after-hours analytics to real-time? Olap cubes need massive calculations but it’s certainly possible to perform real-time analytics. You need architectures that can do the incremental summations, rather than doing it in one big hit. In some areas, such as fraud protection, there’s not much point in finding the answer the next morning.”

Jones agreed with Tibco’s view that it will not be competing against the likes of Business Objects and Hyperion for now, but added that that could change if the latter companies start to pursue real-time capabilities.

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

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