I was on a call last week, planning some activities around a location intelligence demo for an organization that needs to analyze its business data on a map. Their requirements specifically called for data displayed in "heat map" format, which, if you're a SpotOn Vantage Maps user, you'll know has not been supported.
Until now.
One of the attendees on the call asked:
"How are you (SpotOn) going to handle that heat map requirement?"
I was very happy to be able to answer (somewhat glibly, I admit):
"I think we'll just drag a heat map into the report."
For a long time now, SpotOn has delivered out-of-the-box capabilities to symbolize important business data as points on a map and/or as thematically shaded regions, directly within IBM Cognos BI dashboards:
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| Thematically Shaded Regions |
Points on a Map |
Of course, these simple screen captures don't at all convey the power of dynamic maps in reports, shown here in isolation from both the BI report objects they're used to analyze and the built-in spatial query tools that enable such analytics. Check out our demos if you'd like to see these and others in action.
When it comes to maps in BI, one of the most asked for features over the past several months has been the heat map. Now, there are multiple visualizations commonly referred to as "heat maps". Rectangles that are thematically colored, scaled, and ordered based on a set of measures, for example, is one particular kind of "heat map".
From a location analytics point of view (and with apologies to anyone looking for colored rectangles), our heat map shows measure density on a map, indicating very clearly and quickly where things are concentrated. For example, let's have a look at a customer sales heat map for the USA. As you'd expect, customers and sales are concentrated in densely populated regions:
Heat maps are a great way to see where key business drivers (customers, outlets, sales reps, suppliers, partners... whatever!) are concentrated. Heat maps like this can easily be overlaid onto the other layer types (points and regions) shown above, directly in an IBM Cognos BI report with related business charts, lists, and crosstabs. You can even overlay multiple heat maps one on top of the other, and adjust the transparency to see intersecting regions of interest, all driven by key business measures.
The best news of all: just like all of the integration into IBM Cognos BI, you add a heat map based on any measure with just a few simple clicks. These heat maps, together with some of the other advanced new features we've introduced recently, bring SpotOn Vantage Maps to a whole new level when it comes to location analytics.
- dk