TIBCO Analytics - One Year Later

The past twelve months have been a wild ride in the world of business intelligence and big data, full of acquisitions (including Jaspersoft’s addition to the TIBCO Software family) and innovations. Since forming TIBCO Analytics, we’ve entered an extraordinarily important time for the business and all those customers who’ve placed their trust in us as their partner for data analysis and reporting.   Because of this trust placed in us, and the innovative tools at our disposal as part of TIBCO Software, we have a unique opportunity to deliver best-in-class value with each of our tools.

TIBCO Analytics brings together two market-leading platforms:  TIBCO Spotfire, the award-winning platform for data discovery, analysis and visualization, and TIBCO Jaspersoft, the award-winning platform for embeddable reporting and analysis.  These two platforms solve very different analytics problems and for different types of customers.  Even the very fundamental aspects of these two platforms and the uses for which they are best suited are complementary, which becomes a growing point of emphasis as we aim to deliver increased value for our customers with each product release.

Through the combination of these products and formation of a business unit focused exclusively on Analytics, we have become one of the largest business intelligence tool providers in the industry, and boast one of the largest customer bases as well.  Our significant level of investment in Analytics allows us to solve some of the most important, new analytics problems facing our customers.

We’ll solve these problems through the continued improvement and innovation of both primary platforms (Spotfire and Jaspersoft), and we’ll do so in ways that leverage the strengths of one platform to help the other become more powerful in solving the needs of its core customer.  In other words, we’ll use Jaspersoft-centric features and techniques to help make Spotfire an even more capable data discovery and visualization tool, thereby affordably reaching the broadest possible audience of users, driving greater value in a customer’s investment.

In addition, we’ll use Spotfire-centric features and techniques to help make Jaspersoft an even more capable embedded reporting and analysis tool, enabling more powerful and visual use of data, which also drives greater value in a customer’s investment.

Our longer-term strategy for our Analytics platforms centers on cloud architecture and cloud-based delivery.  Our aim is to literally re-imagine business analytics – the way it is designed, developed, delivered, deployed and consumed – to create a seamless spectrum of web-based analytic services, which can enable anyone to have a personalized or tailored experience that is perfectly fit-for-purpose. It’s an exciting vision and, when we discuss this directly and in more detail with our customers, it never fails to capture their excitement as well.

I look forward to this TIBCO Analytics team describing this vision in more detail for you and then gaining your feedback and engagement so you might join us on this amazing step in the journey toward next-generation data analytics.

The Journey Continues: Reaching Everyone with Analytics. Now as TIBCO Jaspersoft

2014 was an eventful year for Jaspersoft. We launched two new versions of our flagship product, JasperReports Server: v5.6 and v6, both full of clever innovations. We reached new records for total number of customers, product downloads, and registered community members. Oh yeah, and we were acquired by TIBCO Software at the end of April.

Now that Jaspersoft is part of the TIBCO Analytics family of products, a few things change, but most things stay the same. I’m excited that Jaspersoft is now part of a bigger company with complementary Analytics tools, which will allow it to solve more customer problems in more areas of the globe. I’m also thankful that we’ll continue all that has made Jaspersoft's business intelligence solitions great: focus on innovation, commitment to solving embeddable analytics projects, being a great provider of open source software and member of the Open Source community, and always putting the interests of customers and community first.

What’s Changed, Now That Jaspersoft is Part of TIBCO?

Jaspersoft products are now part of a bigger, more comprehensive set of Analytics offerings which will allow it to ultimately solve a broader set of a customer’s analytics needs.  Within TIBCO Analytics, the Jaspersoft product line now sits next to TIBCO Spotfire, the market-leading data discovery, analysis and visualization tool that has been part of TIBCO since 2007.  These two tools (Jaspersoft and Spotfire) are extremely complementary, so you can expect, over time, one tool to help the other be even stronger in its primary category (Jaspersoft in embedded reporting and analytics and Spotfire in data discovery and visualization).

Jaspersoft personnel are now part of a bigger, more global infrastructure and workforce that will allow it to scale more easily and serve customers more fully.  Because of Jaspersoft’s commercial open source roots, its customers are all over the globe.  Now, as part of a much larger enterprise focused exclusively on mission-critical business software, the Jaspersoft team will be able to more efficiently work with customers wherever they are and satisfy a broader range of projects and needs than we would have as an independent company.  I am hopeful that, like me, our customers see this as a powerful next step for Jaspersoft.

What Stays the Same, Now That Jaspersoft is Part of TIBCO?

All the things about Jaspersoft that matter most to customers should remain the same: 

• Our relentless focus on innovation, which propels us to create the most affordable reporting and analytics solutions to solve the next decade’s analytics problems; 
• Our leadership in embedded reporting and analytics, which allows Jaspersoft tools and the insight they provide to become a contextually-relevant part of thousands of other pieces of software, helping millions of users each day to become more capably analytic;
• Our being a great Open Source software provider, community member, and participant;
• Our never-ending drive to build an efficient and successful operating model, which ensures our customers receive the greatest value in licensing and using our software;
• Our laser focus on customer success, our highest priority goal, along with our recognizing that we succeed only when our customers’ succeed; and
• Our constant quest to reach everyone with analytics; that is, our understanding that analytics must become a thing that you do, not a place that you go.

As we journey forward into 2015, I hope that you, our customers and partners, will let me know how we are doing against this list of things that will and won’t change.  My responsibility is to ensure that a broader, deeper and, ultimately, even more successful relationship emerges between our customers and TIBCO Analytics, of which Jaspersoft is a critical part.  As always, my email inbox is open and I’d like to hear from you.

Thank you for your business and partnership.  Best wishes in 2015.

Brian Gentile

Former Chairman & CEO, Jaspersoft

Now Sr. Vice President & General Manager, TIBCO Analytics

email: bgentile@tibco.com

What's Next for Big Data?

Big Value.  Broad Usefulness.

The time for putting all data to work is now.  The cost of collecting and using all data is plummeting. Meanwhile, the tools to access and work with data are becoming simpler. New, big, multi-structured data sets combined with the significant architectural advances of cloud computing has created advantages accessible to any organization.  Most profoundly, the next few years will usher in a new class of application, one that uses all available data and is built on the superior economics of cloud-based computing. This class of applications will help make big data small and will be purpose-built to solve an enormous array of real business problems. This is what’s next for Big Data.

Cost reduction and improving economics are key ingredients to pervasive use of data.  Open source projects are fueling the rise in usefulness of Big Data and creating disruption on a grand scale.  Apache Hadoop and Cassandra are some of the best known examples, but represent just tips of the iceberg. A recent IDG survey showed that 70% of enterprises already have or are planning to implement a Big Data project and about 30% of respondents reported using an open source big data framework, such as Hadoop. Our own Big Data survey described a doubling of Big Data projects (versus our same survey last year) as well as a marked reduction (47% decrease) in the confusion about the definition and usefulness of Big Data. 

I’ve written previously about the amazing advancements in sensor technologies, storage resources and compute cycles – which create a perfect, low cost foundation for developing and delivering new applications that harness huge data sets to new effect. Two of my favorite examples of this new generation of applications in action are Clockwork and TrackX (formerly Fluensee).

Clockwork has created a modern, cloud-based Enterprise Asset Management system that is transforming the management of capital-intensive assets for any size of organization.  Clockwork recently reported that it has saved its customers more than $3 billion in the past year by combining sensors and sophisticated software to fundamentally improve the maintenance, repair and operations of their assets.

TrackX creates software and technology to effectively track and manage physical assets using RFID, barcode, GPS and sensor technologies with its rapidly-deployed, cloud-based software.  A key ingredient in TrackX solutions is analytics, because its mission is to provide insight on all asset-related data. TrackX takes all asset attributes and measurements and creates an analytical picture that provides customers with actionable intelligence to better optimize time, labor and asset productivity.  This insight is cleverly designed-in its application software, helping anyone in the organization to become more analytically-astute.

So, What’s Next for Big Data?

The two large growth areas for analytics are: 

1. making data scientists far more capable by giving them more useful and cost-effective tools than ever before, including Jaspersoft’s recent innovations enabling rapid blending of big and small data through data virtualization;

2. making everyone else in the organization more capably analytical by providing them with just the right amount of analytics at the right place and the right time (no more, no less) within the applications and processes they use every day. As a result, they can make better data-driven decisions than ever before.

The second growth area above will have the broadest, most transformational effect on an organization because it can involve everyone, regardless of level or title, making decisions on a daily basis. IDG’s recent survey found that 42% of the respondents plan to invest in these applications in 2014, making this one of the top five areas for investment. 

This investment level should provide us with great hope, because, although we’re in the very first phase of a revolution in data and analytics, the evidence is now clear.  Dramatically lower costs for capturing and using all the data, combined with a new breed of cloud-based analytical applications, will power huge gains in value and usefulness for data in any organization.

Trend #4: Follow the Money, Business-led Tech Innovation Will Disrupt and Drive Growth

Four Trends That Will Shape 2014 

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe

will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics. Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts. I invite you to follow this short series through my first, second and third installments and now my fourth (and final) below.  Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's product priorities as well. I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

Putting more data to work drives innovation.  Innovation can transform processes, products, services and people. Our newfound ability to cost-effectively analyze and find hidden patterns in huge swaths of data will enable a new generation of business-led technology innovation.  With this trend, the IT organization must find new ways to integrate and collaborate within the enterprise, becoming an enabler of business-led innovation.  This collaboration is more important than ever as technology now defines the new economic battleground for every industry and organization.  Even Gartner’s latest predictions abound with a Digital Industrial Revolution theme and watchwords for CIOs and their IT organizations to either lead or get out of the way.  It’s a bold new world.

All companies are now technology companies.  Every organization must put technology to work in ways that create distinction and competitive advantage.  Evidence of this trend can be found in any industry-leading company today, where IDC says that business units already control 61% of tech spending.  Fortunately, the technological barriers to entry have never been lower.  Organizations of all sizes now have affordable access to powerful, enterprise tools, which levels the playing field, allowing even small companies to compete with the big guys (sometimes even more effectively, because of their nimbleness).  One example is AirIT, which can help every airport become a technology-enabled data center, driven by metrics relevant to the business, which in turn, streamline operations and save money.

Leading enterprises will overtly staff, skill and organize to maximize innovative uses of technology – creating a cascade that will impact education, training and personnel management in all corners of the organization.  Even military organizations realize that gaining skill and expertise in data and analytics will remain at the forefront for personal advancement.  The risk for all is that a concentration of even deeper technology skills will create digital haves and have-nots within industries, creating a difficult spiral for laggards.

Lastly, in order for business-led tech innovation to really flourish, many more knowledge workers (than today) must have access to just the right amount of data and analysis, at the right place and the right time (not too much, not too little), which promises to make everyone into a more capable analyst and decision maker (regardless of job level, title and even skill).  In 2014, analytics becomes a thing that you do, not a place that you go and the need for intelligence inside of the applications and business processes we use every day becomes an agent of business-led tech innovation.

Trend #3: From Schema-Constrained to Idea-Constrained, The Real Big Data Opportunity

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe

will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics.  Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts.  I invite you to follow this short series through my first and second installments and now my third below. Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's product priorities as well.  I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

Trend #3:  From Schema-Constrained to Idea-Constrained, The Real Big Data Opportunity

In the past (and too often today), we collected just the data that we could afford to store and for which we had a clear, known use.  In this sense, we were hard-wired to winnow the data down to its most obvious and practical subset; thus, we were (and are) schema-constrained. By this I mean that today we must know, in advance, the uses for data as they are being captured.  This mindset leaves little-to-no room for future, latent value that may exist within a data set.  In physics, we recognize that energy has an immediate value (kinetic) and a future value (latent).  Why should data be any different?  

As costs have declined and the power of technology has increased exponentially, we now have the ability to store and use ALL of the data, not just some of the data. But, we may not always know the value of this data while it is being captured.  That’s okay.  The latent value of data will become more obvious each year and the technology now exists for this to be the norm.  In this sense, the real big data opportunity is based on the scale of our ideas to put data to work, finding new correlation and value where it previously was not discernible.  

Unlocking this new value becomes easier as the world is increasingly digitized; that is, we now regularly put very new data types to work:  geo-position / location, sensor updates, click streams, videos and pictures, documents and forms, etc.  Just a few years ago, almost none of this would have been considered “data”. Commonly using all these new data types and searching for correlations that can positively impact business will shift the primary constraint to the quality and quantity of our ideas.  

Perhaps my favorite example of latent data use is the world’s first consumer light field camera from Lytro.  The Lytro camera captures and processes the entire light field (11 million rays of light, to be precise).  This allows every shot to be filtered and viewed from any perspective, after the shot, allowing the user to later uncover what the best focus, angle, and zoom, might yield.  Lytro refers to the result as a “living picture” with a 3-dimensional feel.  What a beautiful use of big, latent data.

In 2014, we’ll move from being schema-constrained to idea-constrained, more often finding the real value in Big Data.

Trend #2: Cloud-Based Delivery Will Change The Analytics Consumption Pattern

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe

will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics. Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts. I invite you to follow this short series with my first installment here and my second below.  Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's business intelligence product priorities as well.  I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

As cloud-originated data growth accelerates, the attractiveness of using additional cloud-based data management and analysis services will grow too. I’ve previously written about an entirely new generation of platform and middleware software that will emerge to satisfy the new set of cloud-based, elastic compute needs within organizations of all sizes.  Commonly at this software layer, utility-based pricing and scalable provisioning models will be chosen to more strictly match consumption patterns

with fees paid.  These improved economics, in turn, will enable broader use of platform and middleware software, especially reporting and analytics, than ever before possible.  

Additionally, cloud-based delivery portends a level of simplicity and ease-of-use (consumer-like services) that defies the earlier generation of enterprise software, ushering in deeper consumption of analytics by organizations of all sizes.  In short, cloud-based delivery becomes a key component of the quest for pervasive analytics – especially when those analytics are delivered as components within the web applications we use every day.

According to Nucleus Research: “As companies learn to take full advantage of the analytics functionalities that are now available with utility and subscription-based pricing options, they will continue to become more able to take advantage of market trends and opportunities before their peers and take advantage of the average return of $10.66 for every dollar spent in analytics.” In 2014, cloud-based delivery will change the analytics consumption pattern.