The expertise at Practical Computer Applications (PCA)  in Smart Client technology allows us to completely hide from end users the complexity of Microsoft's Business Intelligence stack, which includes Windows Server, SQL Server, (SQL Server) Analysis Services and Reporting Services, new Power View's Data Visualization functionality, xVelocity in-memory data engine, Columnstore Indexes, Internet Information Server, SharePoint Server, Active Directory and many other technologies.

Smart Client applications with embedded Power View  provide for user an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation web experience. PCA takes care of all development and infrastructure problems so our users have an easy access to new Power View functionality.

Previous report designers (still available from Microsoft:  BIDS, Report Builder 1.0, Report Builder 3.0, Visual Studio Report Designer) are capable to produce only static reports, but Power View enables users to visually interact with data and drill-down all charts and Dashboards similar to Tableau and Qlikview. In short, Power View allows PCA users to have Data Analytics easier to use.

Compare with previous report builders from Microsoft, Power View allows many new features, like Multiple Views in a Single Report, Gallery preview of Chart Images, export to PowerPoint, Sorting within Charts by measures and Categories, Multiple Measures in Charts, Highlighting of selected data in reports and Charts, Synchronization of Slicers (Cross-Filtering), Measure Filters, Search in Filters (convenient for a long lists of categories), dragging data fields into Canvas (create table) or Charts (modify visualization), convert measures to categories ("Do Not Summarize"), and many other features, including new types of Charts, like Trellis

and ScatterPlot:

It is a PCA experience that the Analytical applications in many cases need to be able to use OLAP Cubes from SSAS (SQL Server Analytic Services) and  Excel PowerPivot as data sources while preserving all Cube infrastructure, design, dimensions, measures and calculations. Power View can use SSAS Cubes and connect to PowerPivot. Power View is a good choice for those PCA customers, who has their IT infrastructure build with Microsoft software stack and who needs advanced Data Analytics.

If you need to discuss your Data Visualization, BI and Data Analytics needs in more details, please Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722x127 or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

PCA also did a few custom projects where the choice of the technology stack was initial part of those projects. Detailed Results of those efforts we are happy to share with PRACTICAL blog visitors:

the webpage "Tableau vs Qlikview" you can find here: http://www.practicaldb.com/data-visualization-consulting/tableau-vs-qlikview/ 

and the webpage "Tableau vs Spotfire" can be found here:  http://www.practicaldb.com/data-visualization-consulting/tableau-vs-spotfire/ 

 Tableau has advantage over other vendors due its unique ability to connect to SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Cubes and to local PowerPivot multidimensional Cubes. Another unique feature of Tableau is its ability to distribute Data Visualizations and Interactive Visual Reports without Server involved due free Desktop Tableau Reader.

Such a feature (free Desktop Reader) while convenient and is the money saver, it is only complementary because most users need the remote multi-user access to fresh up-to-date centralized data and business logic. All 3 Data Visualization Vendors: Tableau, Spotfire and Qlikview have excellent application servers, which allow to publish securely Data Visualizations on intranet and over internet and access them with web browser.

If you need to discuss your Data Visualization, BI and Data Analytics needs in more details, please Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722x127 or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

Data Visualization has at least 3 parts: largest will be a Data, the most important part will be a Story behind those Data and a View (or Visualization) is an Eye Candy on top of it.

However only a View allows users to interact, explore, analyze and drilldown those Data and discover the Actionable Info, which is why Data Visualization (DV) is such a Value for business user in the Big (and even in midsized) Data Universe.

Productivity Gain.

One rarely covered aspect of advanced DV usage is a huge a productivity gain for application developer(s). The estimation of a time needed to develop an interactive DV reporting application with 2 different groups of DV & BI environments is very different for traditional BI and advanced DV tools.

Samples of Traditional BI Platforms can be toolsets like Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, SAS, Jaspersoft, Infobright, or Microstrategy (before the release of Visual Insight).

Samples of Advanced DV tools, ready to be used for prototyping is what we used here at PRACTICAL: Spotfire, Tableau andQlikview.

Results proved a productivity gain I observed for many years now: traditional BI environments need month or more to complete the prototype and advanced DV toolsets required a few days to complete the prototype of the application. The same observation done by ... Microstrategy when they added Visual Insight (in attempt to compete with leaders like Qlikview, Tableau, Spotfire and Omniscope) to their portfolio (see below slide from recent Microstrategy presentation, this slide did not count time to prepare the data and assume they are ready to upload):

PRACTICAL uses this productivity gain for many years not only for DV production but for Requirement gathering, functional Specifications and mostly importantly for a quick Prototyping. Many years ago I used Visio for interactions with clients and collecting business requirements, see the Visio-produced slide below as an approximate example:

DV is the best prototyping approach for traditional BI

This leads to a surprising point: modern DV tools can save a lot of development time in traditional BI environment as ... a prototyping and requirement gathering tool. Our recent experience is that you can go to development team which is completely committed for historical or other reasons to a traditional BI environment (Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, SAS, Microstrategy etc.) and prototype for such team dozens and hundreds new (or modify existing) reports in a few days or weeks and give it to the team to port it to their traditional environment.

These DV-based prototypes have completely different behavior from previous generation of (mostly MS-Word and PowerPoint based) BRD (Business Requirement Documents), Functional Specification, Design Documents and Visio-based application Mockups and prototypes: they are living interactive applications with real-time data updates, functionality refreshes in a few hours (in most cases at the same day as new request or requirement is collected) and readiness to be deployed into production anytime!

However, in our estimate the many BI teams, even they will be impressed by prototyping capabilities of DV tools (and some will use them for prototyping!), will stay with their environment for many years due political (can you say a "job security" ?) or other "strange" reasons, but more and more teams will seriously consider to switch to Qlikview/Tableau/Spotfire, at least for prototyping purposes. As you see from Diagram below, the Prototyping is very important part of our PRACTICAL process:

Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722x127 or Request For Informationregarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

 (while adding multi-tenancy, which is the sign of the maturing toward large enterprise customers) and adding “Data Server” features, like sharing data extracts (Tableau-optimized DB-independent file containers for datasets) and metadata across visualizations (Tableau applications called workbooks), automatic (through proxies) live reconnection to datasources, support for new datasources like Hadoop (since 6.1.4) and Vectorwise and new “Connect to Data” Tab:

Tableau’s in-memory Data Engine (required to be used with Tableau Professional) is the 64-bit executable (if running under 64-bit Windows). Most appealing and sexy new features in Tableau 7.0 are related to mapping. For example I was able quickly create Filled Map, showing the income differences between states of USA:

Other mapping features include wrapped maps, more synonyms and mixed mark types on maps (e.g. PIE instead of BUBBLE), the ability to edit locations and add new locationsas well as using Geography as Mark(s), like I did below:

Tableau 7.0 supports new types of Charts (e.g. finally Area Charts) and has new Main Menu, which actually causes a lot of changes where user can find menu items. Tableau added many analytical and convenience features for users, like parameter-based Ref.lines, Top N filtering and Bins, Enhanced Summary Statistics (e.g. median, deviation, quartiles, kurtosis and skewness are added):

Trend models are greatly improved (added t-value, p-value, confidence bands, exponential trends, exporting of trends etc.). Tableau 7.0 has now 1-click and dynamic sorting, much better support for tooltips and colors.

Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722x127 or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

External References.

And technology and process of how these Data collected, extracted, transformed and loaded into DV backend and frontend is a key to DV success. It seems to me that one of the best possible technologies for building DV backend is around the corner as SQL Server 2012 will be released soon - Release Candidate for it is out... SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event planned for March 7, 2012 and real release probably at the end of March 2012.

Columnstore Index

I already mentioned on this blog the most interesting feature for me - the introduction of Columnstore Index (CSI) can transform SQL Server into Columnar Database (for DV purposes) and accelerates DV-relevant Queries by 10X or even 100X of times. Oracle does not have it!

Some reasonable rules and features applied to CSI: each table can have only one CSI; CSI has Row grouping (about million rows, like paging for columns); table with CSI cannot be replicated. New (unified for small and large memory allocations) memory manager optimized for Columnstore Indexes, supports Windows 8 maximum memory and logical processors.

Power View

SSRS (Reporting Services) got massive improvements, including new Power View as Builder/Viewer of interactive Reports. I like this feature: "even if a table in the view is based on an underlying table that contains millions of rows, Power View only fetches data for the rows that are visible in the view at any one time" and UI features (some of them are standard for existing Data Visualization tools, like multiple views in Power View reports (see gallery of thumbnails in the bottom of screenshot below):

as well as "2 clicks to results", export to PowerPoint etc. See also video here:

Power View is behind of Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire as a Visualizer, but at least it makes SSRS reports more interactive and development of them easier. Below are some thumbnails of Data Visualization samples produced with Power View and presented by Microsoft:

Support for Big Data

SQL Server 2012 has a lot new features like "deep" HADOOP support (including Hive ODBC Driver) for "big data" projects, ODBC drivers for Linux, grouping databases into Availability Group for simultaneous failover, Contained Databases (enable easy migration from one SQL Server instance to another) with contained Database users.

Parallel Data Warehouse, Azure, Data Explorer

And don't forget PDW (SQL Server-based Parallel Data Warehouse;  massive parallel processing (MPP) provides scalability and query performance by running independent servers in parallel with up to 480 cores) and SQL Azure cloud services with it high availability features...

New Data Explorer allows discover data in the cloud and import them from standard and new data sources, like OData, Azure Marketplace, HTML etc. and visualize and publish your Data to the cloud.

LocalDB

LocalDB is a new free lightweight deployment option for SQL Server 2012 Express Edition with fewer prerequisites that installs quickly. It is an embedded SQL Server database for desktop applications (especially for DIY DV apps) or tools. LocalDB has all of the same programability features as SQL Server 2012 Express, but runs in user mode with applications and not as a service. Application that use LocalDB simply open a file. Once a file is opened, you get SQL Server functionality when working with that file, including things like ACID transaction support. It’s not intended for multi-user scenarios or to be used as a server. (If you need that, you should install SQL Server Express.)

BIDS

SQL Server 2012 is restoring a very desirable feature, which was missing in Visual Studio 2010 for 2+ years - something called BIDS (BI Development Studio was available as part of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008). For that a developer needs VS2010 installed with SP1 and then install "SQL Server Data Tools" (currently it is in the state of CTP4, but I guess it will be a real thing when SQL Server 2012 will be released to production).

SSAS, Tabular Mode, PowerPivot, DAX

Most important improvement for BI and Data Analytics will be of course the changes in SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), including the addition of  Tabular Mode, restoration of BIDS (see above), the ability to design local multidimensional cubes with PowerPivot and Excel and then deploy them directly from Excel as SSAS Cubes, the new DAX language shared between PowerPivot and SSAS, and availability of all those Excel Services directly from SSAS without any need for SharePoint. I think those DV tools who will able to connect to those SSAS and PowerPivot Cubes will have a huge advantage. So far only Tableau has it (and Omniscope has it partially).

Best Backend for Data Visualization

All of these features making SQL Server 2012 a leading BI stack and backend for Data Visualization applications and tools. I just wish that Microsoft will develop an own DV front-end tool, similar to Tableau or Qlikview and integrate it with Office 201X (like they did with Visio), but I guess that DV market ( approaching $1B in 2012) is too small compare with markets for Microsoft Office and SQL Server.

Happy 2012!

Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722x127 or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

Some of new features defined in fuzzy terms: “”free dimensional” analytics, collective intelligence, visual and social data discovery etc, but others can be very useful and practical, like integration with TIBBR (that I like; in fact TIBCO has many other good products and they should be integrated with Spotfire) and SharePoint (good for Microsoft partners), support for dynamic icons, sparklines, stepped linecharts, pop-over filters and legends, better font management, embedded actions and more. Some features I wish will be added, but I guess we need to wait more: I wish to be able to read with Spotfire the SSAS and PowerPivot multidimensional Cubes and support for some other Data Sources…

Spotfire and its Web Player Server support  now the latest web browsers, .NET 4.0 and it dropped support for obsolete stuff like Internet Explorer 6 and Windows 2003 Server. I mentioned on this blog earlier that I like Spotfire Silver 2.0 and the wealth and depth of Spotfire Analytical Platform (S-Plus, Miner, S+FinMetrics, Spotfire Developer/API, Statistics, Data and Automation Services, Metrics, Network Analysis, Decision Site, Clinical Graphics and more, this list should make Qliktech and Tableau worry or at least try to add similar features…).

Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone:  617-527-4722x127 or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

 Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

External References.

1. Spotfire updated their set of Demos to reflect Spotfire 4.0 features: Spotfire Demos and Templates.

I expected Qlikview 11 to be released on 11/11/11, but it was announced on 10/11/11 ( one year after 10/10/10, the release date of Qlikview 10) and not release yet as of today. 

Qliktech also lunched new demo site with 12+ demos of Qlikview 11 Data Visualizations. Since Qliktech is public company we know the latest marketing parameters of Qliktech, which are impressive: about 1 million licensed users, 22000 customers in 100 countries, 1200+ partners, 1000+ employees, 65000+ QlikCommunity members, $315M revenue expected in 2011 (compare with $226M in 2010 and $157M in 2009, averaging 50% YoY revenue growth in last 6 years). Major factors of revenue: Europe (56%), Existing Customers (58%), Licenses (61%), Partners(52%). Qliktech expected to release Qlikview 11 before end of 2011 and here it is:

Update from QlikCommunity, 11/23/11: "QlikView 11 arrives!  ... we are pleased to release the QlikView 11 to our customers & partners. QlikView 11 unveils brand new capabilities against 5 key themes... Regards, The QlikView R&D and Products Team"

Collaborative Data Visualization and Discovery.

Also Qlikview 11 enables Collaborative Workspaces – QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app and can see others’ interactions live, see

QlikView users can engage each other in discussions about QlikView content. A user can create notes associated with any QlikView object. Other users can then add their own commentary to create a threaded discussion. Users can capture snapshots of their selections and include them in the discussion so others can get back to the same place in the analysis when reviewing notes and comments. QlikView captures the state of the object (the user’s selections), as well as who made each note and comment and when. 

“Our vision for QlikView 11 builds on the fact that decisions aren’t made in isolation, but through social exchanges driven by real-time debate, dialog, and shared insight,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior Vice President, Products at QlikTech. “QlikView 11’s social business discovery approach allows workgroups and teams to collaborate and make decisions faster by collectively exploring data, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Business users are further empowered with new collaborative and mobile capabilities, and IT managers will appreciate the unified management functionality that allows them to keep control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organization.”

New Features in Qlikview 11

Qlikview now is integrated (I think it is a big deal) with TFS - source control system from Microsoft. This makes me think that may be Donald Farmer (he left Microsoft in January 2011 and joined Qliktech) has an additional assignment to make it possible for Microsoft to buy Qliktech? [Dear Donald - please be careful: Microsoft already ruined ProClarity and some others after buying them]. Free QlikView 11 Personal Edition will be available for free download by the end of year.

Among new Qlikview features:

• mentioned above Comparative Analysis
• Collaborative Data Visualization
• integration with TFS
• granular chart dimension control.
• Conditional Enabling (dynamic add/remove) dimensions and/or expressions/metrics
• Grid Container to show multiple objects, including another containers
• Metadata for Charts: annotations, tips, labels/keywords, comments, mouse-over pop-up labels
• some new actions (including Clear Field)

External References.

In 1991, Lotus released Improve with Pivoting functionality, followed by Microsoft’s release (in Excel 5) of PivotTable in 1993 (trademarked by Microsoft). Below you can find the discussion of PivotTable in Excel 2007 (before PowerPivot was released):

Essbase was the first scalable OLAP software to handle large data sets that the early spreadsheet software was incapable of. This is where its name comes from: Extended Spread Sheet Database (Essbase owned by Oracle now).  Currently one of the best OLAP and BI software is SSAS (Analysis Services from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2) and Excel 2010 with its PowerPivot, PivotTables and Pivot Charts is one of the most popular front-end for SSAS.

There is no doubt that Microsoft Excel is the most commonly used software for BI purposes. While Excel is general business software, its flexibility and ease of use makes it popular for data analysis with millions of users worldwide. Excel has an install base of hundreds of millions of desktops: far more than any other BI platform. It has become a household name. From educational utilization to domestic applications and enterprise implementation, Excel has been proven incredibly indispensable. Most people with commercial or corporate backgrounds have developed a proficient Excel skillset. This makes Excel the ultimate self-service BI platform.

Excel as a BI Platform

Traditionally, small businesses are not considered as an important market segment by most BI vendors. Their data analysis and reporting needs are limited primarily due to their smaller commercial volumes. However, this is changing quickly as smaller organizations begin to collect large amounts of data, thanks to the Internet and social media, and require tools to manage that data. However, what is not changing is the limited financial resources available to them. Small businesses cannot spare to spend large amounts of money on BI software or consultants to aid them in the creation of the applications. That’s why Excel is the ideal platform for them and will most probably remain that way for a foreseeable future. The reasons are clear: (1) most of them already have Excel licenses, (2) most of their users know how to use Excel and (3) their needs are simpler and can be met with Excel.

Mid-range businesses are a quickly growing market segment for BI vendors. Traditionally, Excel as a BI platform has been more popular among these businesses. Cost and availability are the primary factors in this. Two reasons existed recently to search and alternatives to Excel 2003-07:  Excel 2003 can no longer handle their growing data volumes and other BI vendors started offering cost-effective alternatives like Google Apps or Data Visualization tools. As a result, Excel’s market share in was in decline (for Mid-range businesses market) until the release of Office 2010 and its extended capabilities for handling very large data sets. Now Excel 2010 with its free PowerPivot Add-in stands a good chance at reversing this decline.

Even in large Enterprises, usage of Excel for BI purposes is common. Business users often go to their data warehouses or BI tools and get a data extract to bring into Excel. They can then prepare their analysis and build their reports in Excel. Enterprises will continue using their existing BI platforms because they have made huge investments building those systems. However, Excel use by business users as their secondary BI and reporting tool will continue to rise unless the alternative vendors significantly improve their self-servicing capabilities.

PCA is your BI and Excel expert.

PCA has a huge and extensive experience with the usage of Excel as BI, prototyping and Analytical tool, as a front-end for BI applications, for SQL Server Analysis Services and for PowerPivot-based in-memory Columnar Databases and Multidimensional Cubes, as a starting point for complex BI and Analytical applications, migrating from Excel to Access, SQL Server, Smart Client and to internet toward Web-based BI Applications and even for embedding Excel-based applications into Smart Client and Web Applications! 

Contact Practical Computer Applications via email, phone: 617-527-4722 x127 
or Request For Information regarding our Database, Data Analytics or Data Visualization consulting services.

Andrei Pandre, Ph.D., VP of Data Visualization, Practical Computer Applications

Omniscope will run on Windows (as well as on Mac): all it needs is Java (if needed, a private copy of Java will be installed on your computer as part of Omniscope package). You can get Omniscope Viewer on Linux workstation as well but if you need a full Omniscope 2.6 on Linux, you will have to ask Visokio about special license for you. Visokio is a tiny company, started in 2002. Because of its size and private funding it took 3 years to release Omniscope 1.0 in 2005 and another 4 years to release Omniscope 2.5 in 2009, which is what Visokio was shipping until recently.

Visokio obviously have rich customers in financial (13+ clients), publishing and marketing(10+), and many other  industries and some of them in love with Apple's Macs, but most customers prefer Windows. Omniscope is a Desktop Java application but completely integrated with internet. It has 4 editions (in both 32-bit and 64-bits versions), which are identical as far a deployment file-set concern, so all you need is buy an appropriate license. The installation process requires about 5 clicks, and user can get started by simply dragging in an Excel file and data will immediately appear and can be explored organically.

Omniscope Editions: Viewer, Desktop, Server, Server Plus.

Free Viewer allows server-less distribution of all Data Visualizations and interact fully (explore, select, filter and drill-down among other interactions) with all data, charts and reports, which are all can be easily exported to PDF, PPT, XLS and JPG files. Omniscope has zero-install web component as well. 

Omniscope Desktop/Professional in addition to all Viewer functionality, acts as a Development Studio for Data Visualizations (so called IOK applications are secure and compressed files, ready for easy internet delivery) and as a ETL wizard (using Drag-and-Drop Data Manager) for data: 

Omniscope Desktop creates, edits and continuously refreshes all involved datasets, formulas, filters, views, layouts, even assumption-driven models, designs and export interactive Flash Data Players, embeddable into websites and into documents. Desktop able to read multidimensional cubes, just like Tableau and PowerPivot, which is a big advantage over Qlikview and Spotfire.

Omniscope Server (about $16000) adds to Desktop functionality: enables 64-bit IOK files behave (even remotely) as Central Datamarts (multi-source data assembly), as Timeslices (auto-refreshable proxies for datasources: one per each datasource), as Master Report IOK (automatically refreshed from Central Datamart IOK) and as Distributed Report IOK(s) (automatically distributed and live-refreshed from Master Report IOK), automates the refreshing of data, enables batch and scheduled distribution of customized IOK files.

Server Plus (about $24000) includes all Server functionality and adds ability to empower selected actions in free Omniscope Viewers (e.g. continuous data refreshing from Datamart IOK files, export to XLS, PPT, PDF, add/edit/save comments and queries etc.), permits unrestricted publishing of IOK visualizations, enables white labeling and branding Viewers and IOK files to customers specifications, allows multiple servers work as one.

  Data Engine.

Omniscope is using in-memory Columnar Database, as all best Data Visualizers do but its architecture is different. For example, all datasets are collection of Cells (organized in column, rows and tables). Each Cell with String or Text is a separate Java Object and it leads to a large overhead in terms of memory usage (I always blame Java, which allows only 1.2GB of addressable memory for 32-bit Windows). Some usage statistics prompting that 32-bit Omniscope Desktop/Professional thinks that 5 millions cells is a large dataset and 15 millions cells is a very large dataset. According to Visokio, average client data file is around 40 fields and 50,000 records (2 million cells).

With Omniscope 2.6, experts from Visokio was able to run on 32-bit Windows PC (with 2GB of RAM) the Data Visualization with 70 millions of cells. For comparison with Qlikview I was able to fit 600+ millions of (data) cells into the same 32-bit PC, basically 9 times more data then with Omniscope and overall Omniscope is slower then competitors. As of now, Omniscope will try to use as much memory as possible in order to accelerate performance. I expect in near future the version of Omniscope with large performance and memory management improvements.

64-bit Installations of Omniscope are far more scalable, for example with 8GB of RAM 120 millions of cells was not a problem; largest known installation of Omniscope has 34 million Rows (about half of billion of cells) running on 64-bi Windows/Java PC with 16GB of RAM

In Omniscope 2.6, the DataManager can be used as an entirely new and independent application, allowing you to create and automate ETL workflows, without even loading data into the classic Omniscope interface.  You can visually drag sources in, append and merge, and transform with a variety of powerful operations such as Field Organiser which allows you to add formulas.  You can then publish, including a Batch Publisher which allows you to specify commands in another IOK file, such as "Publish [this subset] to [email] using [this view template]", etc.   

For example, among new features is improved scalability - each additional simultaneous user of a web analysis initially claims very little additional system memory (see above). 

Spotfire 3.3

Many Spotfire customers will be able to support a greater number of web users on their existing hardware by upgrading to 3.3. Spotfire Web Player 3.3 includes significant improvements in memory consumption.  Theoretically goal is to minimize the amount of system memory needed to support larger numbers of simultaneous users on the same analysis file. Main use case here: the larger the file and the greater the number of simultaneous web users on that file, then less initial system memory required to support each additional user: it is greatly reduced compared to version 3.2.1 and earlier.

Additional reason why posting about Spotfire in September2011 is very simple: TIBCO is releasing this month Spotfire Silver 2.0. Spotfire Silver version 2.0 is available now on and officially announced at TIBCO User Conference 2011 (9/27-9/29/11).  Spotfire Silver available in 4 Editions,  and Feature List at Feature Matrix here: Spotfire Silver Feature List . I will talk more about Spotfire Silver 2.0 below after discussing Spotfire 3.3

As I said in a Title: we are witnessing a very mature software. Apparently the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agrees with me and Defense Intelligence Agency Selects TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Solutions for Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Community. "With more than 16,500 military and civilian employees worldwide, DIA is a major producer and manager of foreign military intelligence"

Spotfire 3.3 also includes collaborative bookmarking, which enables all Spotfire users  to capture a dashboard - its complete configuration, including markings, drop down selections, and filter settings and share that visualization immediately with other users of that same dashboard, regardless of client in use. Unlike competitors, Spotfire actually not just a piece of Data Visualization Software, but a real Analytical Plarform, including completely integrated S-PLUS (commercial version of R Library which has more then million of users)

Spotfire has well-thought Web Architecture,

the best Web Client (you can have Zero-footprint Interactive Dashboards, with Spotfire Web Player and Spotfire Silver, which is partially free and indirectly competes with popular Tableau Public) and free iPad Client. Spotfire  has  very rich API, SDK, integration with Visual Studio, supports IronPython and JavaScript , set of Extension Points etc. Spotfire's portfolio includes desktop products (Professional for developers and Enterprise Player for Analysts), Toolset for Researchers (e.g. Decision Site and Analytics Server), Industry Specific Solutions (e.g. for Clinical, Biopharmaceutical, Chemical, Financial and Econometrical Analytics).

Unlike Qlikview, Spofire is very scalable and is not limited by size of RAM (computer's memory), but can use practically unlimited disk-based storage as Virtual Memory for Data Analytics. Spofire has good integration with GIS and its portfolio inludes Modeling and Data Mining functionality.

My only concern with Spotfire is its focus, since it is part of a large corporation TIBCO, which has 50+ products and 50+ reasons to focus on something else. According to IDC and Gartner, Spotfire's revenue in 2009 was about $64M and in 2010 about $70M, which is just about 8% of TIBCO sales. While Tableau and Qlikview are growing much faster than Spotfire (sales-wise), maturity giving Spotfire a good fighting chance in Visual Analytics Market. Since TIBCO bought Spotfire in 2007, I expected Spotfire will be integrated with other great TIBCO products, but after 4 years it is still not a case... And TIBCO has no reason to change its corporate policies, since its busines is very good and stock is doing well. I think it is interesting to notice that TIBCO recently rejected a buyout offer from HP!

Spotfire Silver 2.0

Spotfire Silver Personal Edition is Free (Trial for one year, can be “renewed” with other email address for free) and allows 50MB (exactly the same amount as Tableau Public) and allows 10 concurrent read-only web users of your content. If you wish more then Personal Edition you can buy Personal Plus ($99/year) or Publisher ($99/month or $1000/year) or Analyst ($399/month) Account.

Update 9/27/11: TIBCO officially released Silver 2.0, "TIBCO Silver Spotfire 2.0 gives users the ability to embed live dashboards into their social media applications, including business blogs, online articles, tweets, and live feeds, all without complex development or corporate IT resources... Overall, the software's capabilities foster collaboration, which allows users to showcase and exchange ideas and insights -- either internally or publicly. In addition, it allows users to share solutions and application templates with customers, prospects, and other members of the community."

In any case you will GET for your Account needs a real Spotfire Desktop Client and worry-free and hassle-free web hosting (by TIBCO) of your Data Visualization applications – you do not need to buy any hardware,  software or services for web hosting, it is all part of your Spotfire Silver account.

To test Spotfire Silver 2.0 Personal Edition I took Adventure Works dataset from Microsoft (60398 rows, which is 6 times more than Spotfire’s own estimate of 10000 rows for 50MB Web storage). Adventure Works dataset  requires 42MB as Excel XLS file (or 16M as XLSX with data compression) and only 5.6MB as Spotfire DXP file (Tableau file took approximately the same disk space, because both Spotfire and Tableau are doing a good data compression job). This 5.6MB size of DXP file for Adventure Works is just 11% of web storage allowed by Spotfire (50MB for Personal Edition) to each user of free Spotfire Silver 2.0 Personal Edition.