Tibco Software is to acquire business intelligence (BI) firm Spotfire in a $195m deal that extends the middleware giant’s reach beyond integration.

The deal will complement Tibco’s efforts to provide an event-driven infrastructure that helps customers make real-time decisions, and will help Tibco compete against rivals’ proprietary stacks, the firm said.

Although Oracle recently agreed a deal to purchase Hyperion, Tibco said the Spotfire purchase would give it a different kind of capability to that gleaned from traditional BI.

“Spotfire’s focus has been on a rich user interface so users can ask ad-hoc questions,” said Jeff Kristick, Tibco senior director of product marketing. “Most of the BI vendors have no idea what real-time really means, they take transactional sources and ETL [extract, transform, load] them out to build a data mart. But they don’t know anything about a service bus.”

Tibco’s plan is to maintain the Spotfire brand and separate business unit but to integrate the BI server capabilities over time with Tibco’s tools.

Although Spotfire has a .Net client and Tibco is a Java-orientated firm, Spotfire has plans for a new Ajax-based browser client that would offer a rich web front-end.

The Spotfire acquisition is due to complete by September at the latest.