TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

We use the solution to handle large datasets.

Live Query data on demand, R and Python integration, and the ability to write HTML and JavaScript text areas are all valuable features.

The data compression has room for improvement.

The usage of SPDF files can be improved.

I would like the ability to loop intellect queries the same way that I can with QVD data.

The UI has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is stable.

The technical support is responsive.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

It can be made chemically aware. This is a must-have in pharmaceutical R&D

The in-memory architecture allows the software to be very responsive to user inputs even with large data sets. (This does require that we provide users with appropriate hardware to handle the workload.)

Spotfire is feature rich but not so complicated that users can't be trained to generate their own content. This takes some of the content management burden off of my group and it also, more importantly, gives our scientists a platform to explore their ideas around our data repositories.

In the past five or six years, we've moved away from multiple one-size-fits-all solutions attached to the various data warehouses to using Spotfire as a single point of entry to explore all (well... most) of our data repositories. We now have a team that works with the data stakeholders to make sure the data is federated and presented to the users appropriately. Operating under this model allows us to aggregate data at the project level and takes that burden from the users which allows them to do more science.

In the past few years, web-based analytics has come a long way. I would like to see Spotfire evolve into a product that handles the data volume with in-memory architecture (or some equivalent technology) server-side, but lets us feed the results into any web-based visualization that we can get our hands on.

We brought Spotfire in-house in the pre-Tibco era of Spotfire DecisionSite. I'm guessing I have been using it about 10 years.

Our environment is two application servers and one web player server. Getting all the pieces operating inside of our corporate IT infrastructure was challenging, but the end result does serve well over 1000 thick-client and web-based users.

Being a life sciences company, our support comes from Perkin Elmer rather than Tibco. They have provided us with very good support.

We are running Spotfire with Perkin Elmer's Lead Discovery extension to handle chemical structures.

We have implemented our last couple of major upgrades with an in-house team with remote vendor support. I would recommend this if you are building a large Spotfire environment. Both Tibco and Perkin Elmer can provide that type of support.

My rating for Spotfire is relative to similar software. In my opinion, no other product handles both the large volumes of data and has an easily managed extension to handle chemical structures along with the data.

Rating the software on its own relative to the capabilities I would like to see in a data analysis suite, I would put it at 6/10. It is not trivial to use the API to expand the capabilities of the software and it is cumbersome to manage the content/servers/feature licenses.

As a service company, we were using Spotfire for things like timesheet analysis for our own purposes. What was more important was that we were advising our corporate customers, chemical, oil and gas companies like Shell, Total, and Exxon about where they should use this tool and how to develop an application using it. I'm really on the service side and Spotfire was a tool that I could offer to my customers for delivering projects.

In terms of use case, process data analysis would be number one. Then I'd say industrial performance dashboard, and lastly, problem root cause analysis.

I championed the use of this solution in my company (an engineering service company) and ultimately we delivered a lot of projects. Often, we were working on development, more specifically user interface development, graphical user interface, and other things that were extremely costly and time consuming. When the BI tools arrived, it seemed to be a very fast way to not only analyze data, but also provide interactive dashboards to people, which before would've required the development of a custom tool. This would've been magnitudes higher in terms of price, so I really saw an opportunity there with the BI tools.

At this stage, it was clear that Spotfire was the top runner. I don't have much experience with Tableau, but clearly for scientific applications, Spotfire was awesome. Especially because of its integration with things like RNG. As an engineer, I was very excited.

To be completely frank, the main problem of Spotfire is that it's being destroyed by Power BI. That's the only problem. Otherwise, the product is superior from a technical perspective, but they are victim of an extremely aggressive strategy from Microsoft and therefore, become far too expensive because Power BI is free in organizations. That's Spotfire's biggest weakness.

Another thing is the realtime boarding capabilities and the integration with other realtime streaming products should be much easier. The handling of realtime data could be improved.

I would also improve the consumption of realtime data. I'd also probably improve integration with the RNG, and generally speaking, the data science techniques. I think this is where Spotfire can still play a role and be competitive compared to Power BI. Other than that, I love the product, but I don't know how they can survive the offensive of Microsoft commercially.

I have been using this solution for around six years.

I've had projects running for a while and have no particular complaints about stability. Originally, Spotfire is an offline analysis tool, so stability isn't a huge issue. It's much more of an issue when you do realtime statistical treatment with realtime data . That's where I mentioned they have to improve. 

Tipco is a huge company and they have this policy of acquiring software all the time, which is an interesting yet aggressive policy for development. The problem when you keep acquiring companies is that at some point, you have to integrate the products. That's where things tend to take a lot of time. Afterwards, the integration can sometimes be wishy washy and I think this is what happens in the realtime space. 

Spotfire has identified that there was something in the market that was asking for the consumption of realtime data and the provision of realtime dashboards and analysis. What they've done is half integrate another product that they bought and I found this strategy weak. I think this is where the stability will really become a critical factor, but overall, I would say so far so good.

I think scalability is pretty good. I've seen customers running thousands of reports. For reaching good scalability, it also depends on your network architecture and whether you host it on cloud or not. I would say there's nothing in the software that really worries me, but you can always mess it up.

Overall it's quite good. As a partner, there's a big difference because my request for assistance is usually prioritized over regular customers. I probably had access to the hotline, but it's very clear that when you're a partner and you meet the commercial team, they know that you're pre-sale, and so you get a lot better answers from them than you do from the hotline. Overall, I have nothing to complain about, but I'm not blown away either.

It depends how you deploy it and the use case. If you just want to install it on your computer and get going for self-service usage, that's a matter of five minutes, so that's extremely easy. If you want to deploy it at the corporate level with the web server, that can be more complex. For a corporate analysis solution or corporate dashboarding solution, it's more complex, but also not unexpected.

When you've installed or deployed the software in your company, you're still nowhere; that's probably the IT department's problem generally speaking: Is the product installed? Is someone doing something with it? Is there the necessary skillset around it? Are your engineering and technical personnel able to operate it on their own? That seems to be the least of their worries, but this is why you pay for the software. 

I would say that in terms of a deployment strategy, everyone will do the ITPs. If you have an IT person in your company that knows half of what they're doing, there's no problem. You manage. 

Nevertheless, putting a correct strategy around the use of business intelligence tools in the organization, it's relevant to ask: What will we use it for? What kind of training will we provide? What kind of algorithm will we develop on top of that? I told you that as an integration with the RNG, for example,which is extremely powerful, I think these are big questions that people often forget.

They think that just by a data science or dashboarding tool, results will come out of it miraculously, but no results come out of the software. Results come out of people using the software, so I would say the challenge in terms of a deployment strategy and the time it takes is a complete function of the ambition level that you have. We can deploy it in one night, but then it has no impact on the company and if you really want to make an impact on the company, then I believe that you are looking at deployment activities, which are much longer. Particularly after the deployment, you should probably do something to maintain the life cycle of the product. So I would say an ideal deployment is deployment that never ends.

To summarize, I would say from a technical point of view, deployment should be the least of your problems. It can be easy. Nevertheless, using a quick strategy around the use of business intelligence, that's something different. I believe that all decision makers should really focus their attention on this and not on something as silly as whether the solution is easy to install.

I would rate this solution an eight or nine out of ten.

It's one of the best products I've worked with in my career. Especially in the engineering, oil and gas, or chemistry fields. A long time ago, you found a lot of niche software players, which were terrible software. Being able to introduce something modern like Spotfire was really fresh air for us. It's an excellent product. The ability to customize as well is really good. 

Particularly for us, because as a service company, we tend do things that are a bit more advanced than what the production people do and therefore, I was very pleased with it. 

One of the main features is integrated statistical analysis. At time of first purchase, presentation of tree maps was important, but competitors have closed that gap.

The same way any visualization product has improved things.

Compared to competitors, the UI is quite dated.

Personally, I have used it for six years. In this organization, I have used it for three years.

The server product can have stability issues for certain use cases. The desktop product is fine.

There were no scalability issues.

We did not try technical support.

We are a large organization, and so have Tibco and most of its competitors deployed in one place or another. So there hasn’t been a “switch” as much as an addition.

The desktop product installation is straightforward. Don’t know about the server.

Negotiating large/enterprise licenses has been a trial. The Tibco sales teams have been very difficult to work with - ignoring requests, misrepresenting level of demand, etc. Careful due diligence is required with any (and I do mean any) representation made during the sales/contracting experience.

We evaluated all of them.

Keep an eye on competitors - the usual suspects like Tableau and Qlik as well as tools like Alteryx. There are still use cases for teams/applications where Tibco is a clear choice based on features and price, but the gaps are narrowing quickly. Add to this that your teams and processes are maturing, and may be maturing more quickly than the product suite deployed for them. It’s a mistake to just renew current products as, in many cases, the cost to change is coming down as well.

From an administrator’s standpoint, the most useful component is the Information Designer, which allows one to design links to SQL/Oracle/etc. datasets that query the source system when opened or refreshed. This provides the user base a self-service approach and ensures the query design is not something that jeopardizes the source system or warehouse.

From an end-user standpoint, the most useful features to me were data manipulation capabilities. Spotfire allows users to easily join multiple datasets (from Info Links, spreadsheets, etc.) and create calculations and visualizations against them. With a bit of experience, end users will find Spotfire wonderful for ad-hoc analysis. The other great capability is the extension with R allowing users with R code snippets more visual capabilities (comes with the Advanced Analytics module, I believe).

In my previous organization, Spotfire added a great deal of value by allowing Reservoir and Production Engineering teams self-service access to production and well data. Spotfire allowed our teams to query datasets for their analysis through the pre-defined lens that we had created in Spotfire. In addition, it allowed them to manipulate the data without introducing any risk to the source systems.

The administrative component of Spotfire could use some attention. The Information Designer tool is wonderful, but a level beyond that with hotfixes, updates, and security administration, things get complicated quickly. I have heard that other BI tools in the space are easier to administer.

There are basically two types of Spotfire administration, admin(s) who setup access to data and control the Spotfire library/ies, and admin(s) who manage the Spotfire server and component implementation. Usually, these are not the same person. The administration that involves setting up Data Sources, Data Elements, Filters, and Information Links comes very easily utilizing the Information Designer tool in Spotfire. The administration that is a pain is server administration, mainly because transferring Spotfire files/projects from one environment to another (test to prod during an upgrade) involves exporting the Spotfire library to file storage and then importing it into another Spotfire library. This was the approved method during my day. However, we ended up just doing database copy and refreshes to avoid that entire process.

It is unusual for IT to administer a software suite without the normal dev/test/prod processes. However, with Spotfire and some other BI tools, mass amount of end users create content only in the production environment. In many situations, a Spotfire admin would necessarily make library changes directly in the production environment because it is required to support their users. For Spotfire, it is important early on to define change control processes and procedures, to ensure quality control without limiting end user functionality (which is why you bought Spotfire to being with). Any changes to server or database configuration should go through normal test/prod processes but changes to the Spotfire library sometimes should not (because you are supporting a living and breathing thing with users creating and utilizing content).

Room for improvement would be more guidance up front on these real-world administration scenarios. I don't remember any guidance in these areas and ended up learning much of this the hard way. It is information that folks in the community share, but never gets formalized.

This only applies to enterprise implementations using Spotfire server, not stand alone installations not connecting to a Spotfire library.

I have been using the solution for five years, including previous versions (5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 6.5). I haven’t used 7.5.

We encountered a number of issues with certain Spotfire projects (.dxp files) after completing upgrades. These files were extremely complicated with R snippets running, and numerous datasets, transformations, and calculations being performed by the file. Spotfire allows users to create files that should not be created. In these cases, stability of a file is an issue. Stability and scalability of the solution itself is solid.

Customer service is excellent, quick to respond and knowledgeable.

Professional Services on the other hand is more questionable. I have had wonderful service from some technical staff, but I have also worked with some I would not wish on my worst enemy. It will be important for customers to find PSG resources they trust or to find another experience through a TIBCO partner, etc. I can suggest a number of these to anyone with interest.

The initial setup is quite easy, made easier if you’re blessed with a good DW. Only when you start adding administrative features and distributed user bases with different security requirements does the solution become a pain to administer.

Initial implementation was done before my time. I performed two major upgrades, one with the vendor on-site for two weeks, one alone. I had no issues with the one performed alone. That being said, new departments offering Spotfire as a solution will need support for their first couple hotfixes and upgrades. Refer to what I wrote regarding Professional Services.

My previous employer purchased an enterprise license that accommodated our sharp spike in users (tripled user base in two years). Licensing the thick client versus the web developer or web consumer is critical for technical users. This is dependent upon the company and personnel using the tool. Technical users such as engineers or planners will most likely require the professional client. Light-touch users in organizations who’d rather receive a PDF than perform calculations and pivots will have web-client needs only. Picture MS Excel: If your users are Excel users, they will be thick-client/professional/expensive version users.

I’ve used other solutions in the space including Tableau and SAP BusinessObjects; even Excel and Access can roughly be considered a competitor of Spotfire. I prefer Spotifre to Tableau and BOBJ due to its flexibility and technical capability. Both Tableau and BOBJ seem more structured and stiff. Although beautiful, they sacrifice abilities for tech-savvy end users in return for a friendly-for-all, drag-and-drop, easy-to-print, set-it-and-forget-it-feel. In a bi-modal environment (one tool for key non-changing reports, a different tool for ad-hoc analysis), Spotfire wins the ad-hoc battle versus common competitors.

Spend time scoping the security/folder setup as well as the “Information Links” (queries Spotfire allows users to run). Changing either of these components after users construct their beautiful files against them is a very unpopular thing to do. Predict the dependencies you’re going to create and be strategic in your design.

Spotfire became everyone’s favorite tool if they could learn how to use it.

• Data engine: numerous methods to load load, transform, and merge data from every major data source.
• Web player: out of the box ability to share analysis through web browser. Advanced web functionality to customize with portals.
• Analytics: basic stats functionality out of the box and ability to connect to all major analytics vendors/languages (SAS, MatLab, R, etc.).
• Visualizations: equally suited for data discovery and reports.

• Tibco Spotfire analysts from building Excel and PowerPoint reports and allows them to start analyzing information.
• Standardizes metrics and flow of information within organizations.
• Simple enough for non-tech users to use, but powerful enough for power users to produce advanced analytics.

• Integration with a custom web portal is still challenging.
• Version control should be included to aide development processes.
• Further the out-of-the-box ability to customize visualizations.

I've been using it for over five years, starting with v3.

Initial deployments are normally issue-free. Spotfire supports numerous data sources, authentication methods, load balancers, and other IT environment configurations. Spotfire v7.5+ is a significant change in architecture and will require a different configuration and additional admin training.

Upgrades normally require minor adjustments to some Spotfire analyses. There are Spotfire tools to assess differences between files in each version and the change in performance.

The most common issue is insufficient resources on host servers or laptops. Most other issues arise from custom applications integrating with new versions of Spotfire.

I’ve worked with deployments and upgrades at small organizations and all the way up to 20,000+ user organizations. Spotfire can be scaledeasily, but requires planning and is dependent on the underlying technology (as with any software).

Improved dramatically in recent years with rapid releases of updated versions.

Professional and timely support. The Spotfire upgrade roadmap is a bit opaque though.

Previously I have used Tableau, Business Object, SAS JMP, MiniTab and Excel. Spotfire is most commonly compared against Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy. Spotfire is typically selected for its data engine, web player and advanced analytics capabilities.

It's generally straightforward except for when custom applications, e.g. in-house developed software, are to be configured with Spotfire.

Usually large scale implementations are done by a vendor, but small scale deployments are possible with an internal team. Beyond the basic requirements, the key is to understand scalability needs, community use cases, authentication needs, and data architecture needs. Upgrades can be handled in-house.

ROI can be measured by how much time is saved by your analysts no longer needing to build reports. Typically, a core group of users build the Spotfire templates and everyone else in the organization analyzes information in the templates. Other than upkeep, once a template is built in Spotfire, your organization can analyze information and take action. Also, the time and sanity saved in no longer sharing PowerPoint slides or Excel spreadsheets throughout the organization can be priceless.

ROI can also be measured by the fact that Spotfire can integrate with existing IT infrastructure and existing IT expertise. Eg. Spotfire can make use of your existing SAS environment to apply SAS models and SAS expertise to data in Spotfire (which is then visualized).

I recommend training a core group of analysts to build your Spotfire templates. The rest of your organization can use the less expensive Web Player licenses to analyze the data through their web browser.

I also recommend the Spotfire Automation Services component. It allows Spotfire to automate certain tasks like loading data at defined times, sending automated emails, sending alerts, etc.

Ability to connect to multiple databases. This is important because our company uses many different database solutions across the functional and geographic areas of the organization. Spotfire can map to all of them.

In-memory interactive capability to work with the data. The tool is relatively easy to use without any training, but has many features to slice and dice data in sophisticated ways.

No row/column limitations. Many of our datasets of interest have tens of millions of rows and hundreds to thousands of columns. Spotfire handles these situations with relative ease.

Many users have developed dashboards for management review that are now automatically generated, as opposed to something that requires many hours per week or month.

Some people are using Spotfire to provide analysis updates in meetings as opposed to using static PowerPoint slide decks. This allows for more interaction with the data, as ad-hoc questions can be answered by manipulating Spotfire to display data as requested.

Expert users can deploy analytic platforms for data that are periodically generated, which less-experienced analysts can then use to make good decisions. For example, yield review of batches of material received in manufacturing.

The original version of the system was called DecisionSite, which we installed in 2004. We have maintained continuous capability since that time as the tool has changed over the years.

No specific deployment, stability or scalability issues. We have a dedicated admin who maintains the servers, installs patches, and updates Spotfire to major new revisions as they become available. We have encountered issues and have got them corrected as necessary, but overall the platform is very stable. We have facilities across the world that are using it, so it is generally available 24-7. The Web Player version is heavily utilized, which has required hardware upgrades over the years to keep performance up.

Technical support is acceptable, but not superior. Sometime after TIBCO purchased Spotfire (the company), they outsourced support to Perkin-Elmer. For minor problems, P-E is capable of finding solutions, but problems that require more detailed knowledge of the tool often take very long to resolve. P-E has to go back to TIBCO for assistance in these cases.

We had a number of different tools, some off-the-shelf and some home-grown, before we chose Spotfire. When we decided to look into other options, we evaluated several tools in addition to Spotfire. We eventually chose Spotfire based upon a detailed comparison of its capabilities against the other contenders, including the features mentioned elsewhere in this review.

The installation itself was fairly straightforward, but building up the database connection infrastructure has been an ongoing process. Although it is not problematic in the sense of having issues or bugs, it requires someone with good relational database skills to optimize the Information Model.

There are many tool configuration options that can be set during installation. Most of the default options appear to work well, although we have found a few that required modification in order to optimize the platform to our specific IT infrastructure and user preferences.

We installed Spotfire in two distinct phases: initially, when it was DecisionSite, using an on-site Spotfire team for the heavy lifting, and then a second round when the current version of Spotfire was released. The second round was mostly performed by our in-house admin, with support from Spotfire. This all happened before Spotfire was purchased by TIBCO.

One claim to fame made by Spotfire is that doing sophisticated analyses does not require a team of IT professionals. This spreads the burden of report generation and ad-hoc analyses to the experts in the data itself, which we have definitely seen to be a benefit. We can use the tool without having to write detailed requirements, learning and experimenting as we go before setting up validated dashboards and other reports.

Find first-adopters and enthusiasts in your organization. If you have data, these folks exist. Let them play around with the tool, and then leverage their acquired skills to evangelize.

On a per-user basis, we are saving several hours per week of analysis time. This has been especially impactful for analysts who had been spending as much as 20% to 50% of their time managing and summarizing data each week, and who now have time to generate more detailed analyses in less time. This leads to better insights into the data, and has resulted in more targeted actions to address improvement opportunities.

For ad-hoc analyses, Spotfire allows us to manage much larger datasets than we had ever been able to look at before. This has led to many breakthroughs in productivity, customer focus, supplier management, issue resolution, etc. It is difficult to quantify these situations, but in many cases, we believe we reach solutions faster with Spotfire than we would have done otherwise. In one specific case during our initial evaluation, a large team had been working on a manufacturing yield issue for a month without nailing down the root cause. We decided to apply Spotfire (then DecisionSite) to the data, and literally within 15 minutes we had narrowed the problem down to a specific piece of equipment at a supplier facility. What made this possible was the ease with which we could aggregate the data in ways we had not been able to do without Spotfire.

For licensing, try to obtain as broad a user base as possible. TIBCO offers a variety of licensing schemes, including less-costly individual licenses for the view-only version called Web Player. In order for that tool to be useful, you will need a number of people who are experts in Spotfire Professional to deploy analytic solutions.

There are many options available that are built upon the Spotfire platform (S+, Operations Analytics, Lead Discovery, Cloud, etc.); make sure you review the capabilities of each before deciding which to include.

Determine how organized your internal data sources are, and then put together a strategy for how to build the Spotfire Information Model that will best utilize these resources. Unless you are very confident in your ability to execute, do not attempt to consolidate all of your data sources into one large warehouse. Spotfire works very well with many individual databases, so you may find that a better solution is to construct specific analytical tools within Spotfire that aggregate the data on-demand.

We have a small cadre of individuals who host a weekly online training session. Users can call in with specific questions about analyses they are currently performing. We have found this extremely beneficial in improving the level of Spotfire skill across the corporation. It only takes a handful of people to make this work, and the time investment is minimal, so it’s well worth the effort.