Spotfire DXP is an analytic application designed to allow users to query multiple data sources without requiring help from IT staffers, said Rock Gnatovich, president of the Somerville, Mass.-based company.

"If there is something you want to pursue that you see in the data, you can very rapidly pursue that without calling your database administrator or IT administrator and asking for 50 more reports or to reconfigure the cube," Gnatovich said. "All that becomes self-service to the business user."

By allowing users to author their own guided analytic applications within the context of their business processes, the software is designed to replace Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, he added.

"The most common practice that we see is someone who has statistical reports dumping them into Excel for analysis," Gnatovich said. "Excel for us is a database, [and] we extract data from Excel to do analysis. We would never send data to Excel."

The software also allows users to create new key performance indicators on the fly and makes it possible for the analysis to be updated automatically from source systems.