Business Intelligence Gets a Chemistry Lesson

Infrastructure software vendor TIBCO has a mantra called the “2 second advantage.” Simply put, the company says users can capture and store all the data in the world from analytics applications, but the value of that data is doesn’t hold value if it fails to add to insight at the right time.

Let’s take Hungary, for example, whose central bank is actually shredding old, formerly valuable currency and turning it into heating bricks for the poor to burn and keep warm during this blistering European winter.

This is where Spotfire comes in. TIBCO’s software, that conjures up visions of the WWII single-prop British fighter plane. Spotfire is a visual analytics application that allows the user to import database info, drag various filters on that data and retrieve quick graphical analysis.

TIBCO makes the claim that Spotfire is “Better than BI, Smarter than Spreadsheets” and has a page of demonstrations that range anywhere from labor data to fantasy football analysis. Now I can make better football picks than my wife (who still chooses winning teams by their mascot).

Today, TIBCO announced an integration of Spotfire with Instant JChem, a database management application from Chemaxon.

“Instant JChem is a desktop application for end user scientists. With Instant JChem you can create, explore and share chemical and non chemical data in local and remote databases without additional administration. Instant JChem has a wide and growing range of functionality including customizable database views, integration of library enumeration and dynamic population of columns with singular and combined molecular property and descriptor predictions.”

The marriage of TIBCO’s and Chemaxon’s applications now opens up instant JChem’s data generation and management functionality to the Spotfire analytics platform. Sticking to their “2 second advantage” goals, TIBCO claims, “chemists can evaluate an ever-increasing amount of data derived from screening, ADME, and chemistry research efforts focusing on compound series. This allows them to take full advantage of the information to make the best decisions regarding the prioritization of which compounds to synthesize.”

So with this offering of advanced analytics into the chemical and pharmaceutical industry along with faster and cheaper genome mapping, this could possibly be another of many important steps towards the future of the medical industry and a beginning to the push for individualized medicine.

Imagine a world where commercials for prescription medicine simply say “check with your doctor forthe correct compound” instead of “may make you dizzy, belligerent and hungry”.

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