I'm just back from a busy week at TUCON.  This was the first one we've done where Spotfire has been part of the TIBCO family (the acquisition was announced at the same show last year), and I was really impressed by the event.  Bruce Silver has a good overview of some of the cool things that could be seen at the show (you won't be surprised to know that one of them was Spotfire).

In my mind one of the most exciting things about the show was one that actually flew a bit under the radar.  Given what the news was competing with (the TIBCO messaging appliance announcement, discussion of TIBCO's increasing support for Microsoft, and a number of new product announcements), it's understandable.  However, I think it's the most game changing announcement that the BI industry has seen in sometime.

Ta-da, presenting the first product integrating Spotfire with elements of the TIBCO stack--TIBCO Spotfire Operations Analytics.  It slices, it dices, it does everything but mow the lawn!  Well, and maybe not make you dinner either, but in all seriousness, Operations Analytics has the potential to revolutionize the way that we think about BI, "Pervasive Business Intelligence" in particular, and more generally, how those of us in the information business can deliver insight to our customers. 

The software itself combines Spotfire with TIBCO's continuous event-processing technology, and enables line-of-business professionals to receive pre-specified, data-populated analysis applications in response to business events.  By doing so, Operations Analytics greatly simplifies the task of root-cause analysis, and then, by integrating with other business systems--your BPM queue, for instance--it also makes exception management a lot easier.

Essentially, this is the most concrete realization of in-process analytics around, and the thing I like most about it is that nobody thinks of it as "Business Intelligence" per se.  It's just the application that simplifies their response to a problem in their process--regardless of what that process may be.