SOMERVILLE, Mass., Aug. 9, 2004 -- Spotfire, Inc., a market leader in visual data analytics, today advanced its vision of pervasive business analytics with the announcement of Spotfire DecisionSite(TM) 8 software. The software, which is capable of analyzing any kind of business data, provides visual analytics with remarkable ease-of-use to anyone charged with making decisions within an organization.

"You cannot run a successful business in today's competitive market without effective business analytics," said Rock Gnatovich, President of Spotfire. "This does not mean monitoring past performance with a flurry of reports, but instead having an innate, practiced method to anticipate and respond to tomorrow's problems. Understanding what that data is telling you can make the difference in getting a product to market first, running tight operations and competing effectively."

Although companies invest millions of dollars in databases, enterprise applications and data integration to track information that could help improve business performance, the use of analytics has been limited to small groups of statisticians and high-end analysts. As a result, important data is frequently not analyzed across the organization, limiting companies' ability to respond quickly to changing priorities and dynamic markets. Spotfire has been working with major companies to develop DecisionSite software into an effective, easy to use business analytics tool for users of all levels across the enterprise.

"As the global economy rebounds, business intelligence is near the top of IT and line-of-business agendas," said Howard Dresner, Vice President and Research Fellow, Gartner Research. "Businesses are now looking for solutions that can be used across the organization to analyze everything from sales figures to competitive information to develop a more complete and actionable perspective."

DecisionSite 8 software analyzes any type of business data and offers novel visual slicing and dicing techniques that leave traditional analysis approaches behind. The software is particularly powerful because it caters to peoples' innate ability to recognize data trends and correlations visually, unlike other analysis tools that present information in columns of text and numbers or static plots.

La Suisse Assurance was one of the companies that worked with Spotfire to test the software prior to release. "DecisionSite 8 is a big leap forward for our organization because it allows us to more easily apply advanced analytics to a broader set of critical business problems," said Gabriel Fuchs, a senior manager at La Suisse Assurance. "We can now further improve our analyses, especially for our sales and marketing activities. Furthermore, some of the improvements on the interface in the new version will greatly facilitate the comprehension of the analyses for non-analysts."

Improved Decision-Making through Guided Analytics(TM)

The Guided Analytics available in DecisionSite 8 software walks end-users through the process of analyzing sets of data, giving them a step-by-step workflow while allowing the complete freedom to interact with the analysis at any point in the process. The DecisionSite 8 Library provides a shared repository for analysis guides, files and posters, making it easy for users to share analysis methods and results and to deploy Guided Analytics applications across the enterprise. For those concerned with project management, the SmartLists feature tracks lists of critical elements such as leads, prospects, lots and batches. The software's easy-to-learn environment makes it particularly appealing to users who are not hard core analysts using the software everyday.

With the release of DecisionSite 8, Spotfire has also announced an upgraded server with enhanced services: the Spotfire DecisionSite Analytics Server. This new server enables DecisionSite 8 software to source data from disparate databases and links statistics engines from Insightful and the R Project into the interactive DecisionSite 8 environment (see separate August 9, 2004 press release "Spotfire Drives Business Analysis throughout the Enterprise").

Availability and pricing

DecisionSite 8 is available immediately to all DecisionSite customers under maintenance agreements with no additional license fee.

About Spotfire

Spotfire(R), Inc. provides interactive, visual data analytics applications and services that empower enterprises and their end-users to make fast, accurate business decisions. Over 25,000 users in more than 750 organizations around the world use Spotfire DecisionSite software to analyze their business information in an intuitive, visual environment that speeds analysis and drives confident decision-making. The company maintains U.S. headquarters in Somerville, Mass., and European headquarters in Goteborg, Sweden. Additional information can be found at www.spotfire.com.

Amy Groden, 617-702-1710
amy.groden@spotfire.com