The platform’s next update, which the vendor previewed during a recent virtual user conference, will enable customers to trigger data-driven actions directly from their dashboards.
During his presentation at Tibco Analytics Forum, Amberntsson described how Actions can enable an organization to act on an insight from its Spotfire dashboard rather than exit the Tibco environment, toggle to another system, take action in that system and then return to Tibco to continue monitoring the organization’s performance.
For his example, he used a company that operates wind turbines.
At the company, an operator may be monitoring the performance of the turbines in a Spotfire dashboard. And if that operator sees something that indicates a glitch in the turbine’s performance, the manager may want to stop the turbine until the glitch is examined or perhaps schedule maintenance on the turbine.
Before Tibco developed Actions, stopping the turbine or scheduling maintenance required the operator to leave their Spotfire dashboard, log into another system that controls the turbine, identify the turbine with the glitch and finally take the appropriate action.
With Actions, as soon as the glitch is detected, the operator will be able take the appropriate action, such as stopping the turbine or scheduling maintenance, directly from their Spotfire dashboard.
“If you think about it, [logging into another system] is actually a lot of waste since you just had all that context in the Spotfire dashboard,” Amberntsson said. “Now, with Spotfire Actions, this could all be resolved from the Spotfire dashboard. The user selects the wind turbine and triggers the action needed, all in Spotfire.”
Tibco developed Actions using Tibco Cloud Integration (TCI), a tool that enables organizations to connect different systems, he added.
With TCI, without the user ever seeing it, the appropriate information is passed from Spotfire to the system in which the action takes place.
“Under the hood, the actions are managed by Tibco Cloud Integration, meaning that actions can do straightforward things like updating data in the database as well as trigger advanced workflows involving the orchestration of several enterprise systems or controlling IoT systems,” Amberntsson said.
Beyond the introduction of Actions, Spotfire 12 includes new cloud-native capabilities and an integration to Tibco ModelOps.
Tibco first unveiled the integration with ModelOps in September 2021, but it wasn’t yet generally available. With the release of Spotfire 12, it will be available to all Spotfire users. And through the integration, customers will be able to use governed, pre-trained data models without having to leave the Spotfire environment.
New cloud-native capabilities, meanwhile, are aimed at easing the burden on system administrators.
Admins will be able to update and manage their Spotfire deployments using Kubernetes, Helm Charts and container recipes provided by Tibco, enabling them to easily scale up compute power when needed and decrease usage when workloads decrease.
The result is better performance for end users and control over costs for administrators, according to Amberntsson.
“Cloud is front and center for what we are doing at Spotfire,” he said. “If you are an admin that keeps Spotfire running and updated for your organization, Spotfire 12’s new cloud-native capabilities makes your job quicker and easier.”
Amberntsson added that with the release of Spotfire 12, administrators will be able to deploy a complete Spotfire environment in the cloud using Linux containers in any Kubernetes cluster.
“To achieve this cloud-native way of working and managing Spotfire has been a really large undertaking,” he said. “The engineering team has re-architected the way that Spotfire is managed and enabled.”
Like the introduction of Actions, the new cloud-native capabilities may not attract new customers to Tibco but will substantially benefit the vendor’s existing customers, according to Farmer.
Previously, if administrators wanted to run Spotfire in the cloud, they had to build their own cloud-native capabilities to work along with Spotfire, Farmer continued. The new capabilities will enable them to run in the cloud more easily.
