Well you can't beat free and that's what TIBCO's latest cloudware Silver Spotfire is going to be for the next year.

It's an on-demand analytical BI system with a chi-chi social component. Users - and TIBCO says that means anyone - can create visual analytics and interactive dashboards out of Excel, Access and ODBC data and share reports, dashboards, charts and other visualization and calculations to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base And it can be integrated with social media so users can embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles.

There's an authoring client and web-based sharing and hosting. Monthly hosting options will be available after the introductory year.

The company expects the widgetry, which builds on its previously announced Silver initiative, to expand it into the SMB and consumer market. Users will be able to store 10 megs of data online.

See http://goto.spotfire.com/silverspotfire/.