We announced the release of version 2.1 of Spotfire at the Gartner BI Summit last week, and got some very positive coverage.  While there are a number of cool new features, the one that people found to be the most interesting are the APIs which we've introduced allowing parts of a Spotfire analysis to be incorporated into mash ups.  What's exciting about this for me is that it's a key step on the road to truly pervasive analytics.

We hear a fair bit about Pervasive, Ubitquious and Embedded BI these days, and not without good reason.  As I mentioned in a previous post, if Business Intelligence is going to grow beyond it's traditional users it's going to have to address the processes of other users directly, rather than in the guise of BI.  By allowing IT organizations to combine analytic applications directly with the tools currently addressing these processes, Spotfire now makes it much easier to do this.

This, to me, is precisely the direction that BI and Analytics need to go if it's going to expand to the other 80% - 90% of the enterprise.  End users who aren't already using BI as such probably won't ever use it.  But that doesn't mean that they can't benefit from the analytic tools and techniques that have blossomed in recent years, they just need those tools to exist in process- or function-specific contexts.

As long as vendors try to control the frame in which BI is delivered, I think that they are unlikely to gain much acceptance beyond their current user communities.