The Entrance BI Practice was well-represented at this year’s TIBCO NOW conference, which featured keynote presentations by disruptive thought leaders like VC legend Marc Andreessen, TIBCO Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell.
Five things stand out in my mind as I look back upon the week so far:
1. TIBCO Jaspersoft is bringing BI to the masses
I have to admit, my experience as a BI consultant building self-service analysis tools on the Spotfire platform left me wondering if there is any room for “pixel-perfect” reporting in the BI landscape. TIBCO addressed these concerns at the conference by clearly demonstrating how Jaspersoft will play a very important role as BI expands from the top of an organization down to the users who have traditionally been on the “fringe”. Jaspersoft empowers developers to drop reporting and BI controls directly into their applications–just like the graphing controls of old–but with the added bonus of flexibility. End users can dive into the data, change the presentation of a visualization, and generate reports for day-to-day use. This is huge. “Data democracy” is coming, and TIBCO is leading the revolution with Jaspersoft.
2. Centers of Excellence are a force multiplier in business intelligence
· Business intelligence consultants such as myself have an important role to play in demonstrating best practices, developing solutions and teaching organizations how to start taking ownership of their data. But a truly successful solution features a community within the organization itself: A Center of Excellence. These power users see the value of data and know how to help grow BI in every direction.
3. Data isn’t just big, it’s fast
· Many of TIBCO’s breakout sessions this week focused on the rise of “fast data” in a truly real-time sense. This has implications throughout every enterprise, and oil and gas is no different. Imagine being able to predict pump failures before they occur, and show deviations from normal operation to an engineer who can act before maintenance turns into replacement. TIBCO’s StreamBase working in concert with Spotfire gives upstream the power to create models and apply them to live data. That’s the power of fast data and real-time event processing.
4. Integration isn’t a luxury, it’s a must
Business processes and the applications that drive them generate a wealth of data that cannot be turned into actionable information without integration. Whether you’re a multinational player in energy or an independent focused on the next big asset play, making the right decisions requires input from every department working in concert.
Making those decisions in a timely manner demands integration from all departments. And master data management doesn’t hurt, either!
5. Big things are on the horizon
Sometimes, you need to turn humongous swaths of data into actionable information– we’re talking about terabytes and petabytes that simply won’t fit into a traditional in-memory database. IT has the power to make this a reality today, by leveraging the power of the cloud in concert with its on-prem assets. Platforms such as Apache Spark and NoSQL databases like MongoDB are empowering organizations to operate on this sort of truly big data. But leaving the data in the cloud (say, in Microsoft Azure) allows IT to focus on providing solutions rather than maintaining the complex infrastructure involved. And that’s just the beginning. TIBCO is working on a new technology that leverages graph databases to solve a set of previously impractical problems. I’m very excited to see what’s in store.