Dr. Dobb's | Analytics Player Gives Clearer View

Analytics Player Gives Clearer View

Analytics software maker Spotfire plans to launch a visual tool with interactive graphs and charts that marketing, sales and other business professionals can use on their PC desktop.

September 11, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/database/analytics-player-gives-clearer-view/192701230

Knowing how many Apple Computer Inc. iPods or Hewlett-Packard & Co. OfficeJet printers need to arrive at retail stores three months before the holiday season no longer requires a statistician's brain to figure things out.

Analytics software maker Spotfire Inc. on Tuesday plans to launch a visual tool with interactive graphs and charts that marketing, sales and other business professionals can use on their PC desktop.

The Spotfire DXP Enterprise Player integrates with Spotfire's DXP analytics platform released in July. Rather than generate static reports, users can alter numbers and fields to create "what if" scenarios on purchases and sales. It also can assist in determining the best advertising and marketing strategy to gain the highest return on investments.

While enterprises have benefited from analytics for years, users have lacked the ability to manipulate and interact with the data on the desktop in easy to view graphs and charts, said Mark Lorion, director at Spotfire, Summerville, Mass.

"We provide a series of controls for the data with check boxes and sliders," Lorion said. "Business managers can change the numbers, and then look at the reporting in visual graphs. Take Dell's performance, for example. I can see my national sales numbers, but what about drilling down to focus on a specific customer segment."

Drag and drop data into boxes, graphs and charts. Analyses refreshes and changes are calculated within seconds.

"The tool proves more suitable for sales and marketing analysis because it's visually appealing in the way you can organize the data," said Glenn Wong, director of operations at Trinity Pharma Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of life sciences consulting firm Trinity Partners Inc. "You also have the ability to develop hierarchies and breakdown the data by market into several types of categories."

Wong, a consultant to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, said working with large data sets remains a bit challenging, but continues to work with Spotfire developers to improve the feature.

The interactive data filters prove the most helpful, Wong said. Other features in the Spotfire DXP Enterprise Player let users open and save DXP analysis files linked to corporate data, navigate through preconfigured analysis workflows and applications, export into Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint, and set security and preferences from a central Spotfire Analytics Server. IDC research director Dan Vesset said business analytics has become the No. 2 software investment for companies behind security.

Vesset expects the business analytics category known as "services operations analytics" should reach about $1.2 billion this year, up from $1 billion in 2005.

Industries that have historically invested in the software are life sciences, oil and gas, financial services, and telecommunications, but Vesset said more companies across the board are looking into analytics.

The DXP platform sits on a Microsoft .Net platform, and supports both 32- and 64-bit architectures. It can connect to nearly any Sequel ODBC- or JDBC-compliant database, or file source. Customers also can integrate the tool into an enterprise application from the hosting site salesforce.com.