SPOTFIRE
Accelerators for real-world use cases One of Spotfire’ s priorities is moving users from theory to action. The platform offers industry“ accelerators” – pre-built analytics examples designed for energy, manufacturing and beyond.
“ In energy, for example, we have accelerators for real-time drilling, completions, production surveillance and energy trading,” Michael says. Users plug in their data and quickly see actionable visuals, from drilling rate projections to production forecasts.
Manufacturing accelerators support everything from predictive maintenance to digital twins, helping companies optimise their shop floors and anticipate breakdowns before they happen.
Advanced time series analysis has also become central to Spotfire’ s offering. The ability to summarise, smooth or compare patterns across time or depth – using recent innovations like dynamic time warping – enables operators to make sense of high-frequency equipment readings and geological data.
Michael explains:“ Say you drill two wells of different depths, with similar geology but at different scales. Our methods can‘ warp’ those patterns to align them, helping you transfer learnings from one site to another and improve outcomes.”
Scalable, governable and fine-grained deployment Large enterprises need to balance flexibility with control. Spotfire addresses this with licensing and governance designed for granular permissioning.
“ We are interactive visual data science rather than BI”
MICHAEL O’ CONNELL CHIEF ANALYTICS OFFICER, SPOTFIRE
Features such as Spotfire’ s data virtualisation track precisely who can see which data – down to the row, column or even individual value. Licence management allows organisations to apportion features between different user types, ensuring compliance and budgetary control.
“ It’ s helpful for administration in complex setups,” Michael says, particularly where intellectual property and regulatory constraints demand strict data segregation.
AI-powered exploration Generative AI is the trending disruptor – but integrating it meaningfully into scientific, engineering and sustainability workflows is the real challenge.
Spotfire’ s solution is to embed“ copilots” – intelligent AI assistants that help users with everything from data navigation to configuring sophisticated analyses. Michael believes generative AI is changing the nature of business intelligence toolkits:“ It feels like BI dashboards are becoming replaceable by chatbots … We position away from basic visualisations into industry analytics.
60 November 2025