Business intelligence users know they can’t afford to ignore unstructured data and content, but actually merging documents, emails, and social media updates into BI platforms for analysis is a monster of an integration challenge for IT departments. A new partnership between Tibco Spotfire and Attivio aims to remove that burden entirely and allow business users to get on with the job of discovering meaningful insights.

As a result of the partnership between the two Boston-area companies, users of Tibco Spotfire’s business intelligence and analytics platform will now be able to leverage Attivio’s unified information access capabilities from within the Tibco platform through a search interface. This will allow users to mash-up traditional structured data with unstructured content and analyze the resulting data sets via interactive, real-time visualization capabilities.

“No other business intelligence platform provides the level of access to data and content available within our platform that TIBCO Spotfire has achieved,” said Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio. “This relationship delivers greater control and deeper access to information than ever before, extending the incredible experience and performance users have come to expect with our partners.”

Specifically, Tibco users can now tap Attivio’s text analytics capabilities, such as entity-level sentiment analysis and auto classifications, to enrich existing structured data from CRM, ERP and other corporate data sources. Sales pros, for example, might use the new capabilities to bring together structured sales data with social media analytics to identify otherwise hidden buying patterns, said Greg Goldsmith, Director of Technology Alliances at Tibco Spotfire.

The partnership isn’t just good news for end-users. The ability for end-users to access unstructured data and content via self-service BI means IT departments should receive fewer data integration requests, leaving IT pros to more time to focus in higher-value tasks.

ServicesANGLE

The ability to leverage the entirety of corporate data – both structured and unstructured data and content – for analysis is a must for enterprises to remain competitive in the Era of Big Data. At the same time, such capabilities must be integrated into familiar, self-service business intelligence platforms and tools end users rely on everyday. Applying unified information access technology like that from Attivio to legacy business intelligence platforms is a practical way to achieve both goals.