TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

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.

Driving details visualizations is the most valuable feature of this product to me. One of the greatest strengths of the tool comes from being able to build high-level projects that can be implemented in many ways. In my industry, we are attempting to consolidate analytical tools to give our engineers a few “one-stop shops" rather than each person doing their own work in a bubble. It allows us to collectively write a procedure for data transformation that can accommodate most if not all of our team’s needs.

We are moving away from a single person exploring data and giving presentations towards team exploration of data in a conference room environment.

From what I understand, some of the issues I’ve had have been addressed in 7.0, but my company has not upgraded yet. Layering multiple levels of aggregation is something I’m constantly asked to provide, which has been difficult to do in the versions I have used so far.

I have used the solution for eight years.

Some of the previous versions have had stability issues, but 6.5 appears very stable.

I have run into issues with large datasets (>2M records), and attempting to build relationships between tables for use in a single visualization.

I’ve never been part of the original setup of Spotfire. I’ve worked for four different companies, all of which already had their own server installed. I can say that there hasn’t been much of an issue moving from company to company, other than general organization methodology.

Start small. Tibco tends to push the higher level subscriptions, and want you to buy their server. I’ve found that the base version is a great introduction at a reasonable cost, and allows teams to evaluate whether they want to continue using the product with minimal effort from the IT department (You can just download the base version from the internet and start using it.)

I still currently use a myriad of solutions – it all depends on if I think there will be followup questions asked of the data. Often times, the engineers I work with are not familiar/comfortable with the data, so requests become iterative as projects evolve. There are certainly times where dumping data to Excel and giving a customized pivot table is a better solution because the engineer finds that less daunting.

Make sure you have people dedicated to data quality/analytics. Spotfire isn’t a software package that you can dabble in and make it worth your while. Once you understand how they organize the tools, it is fairly easy to navigate, but things like syntax for expressions/calculations trip people up in their early stages. The reasons to choose Spotfire over other BI tools are that the other tools are more difficult to implement and they will require a significant time investment.

• Information links, though a little complex, really make connecting to data sources reliable.
• The predictive data analytics in Spotfire 7.0 make it super easy to build a report on the fly.

Spotfire is great for data visualization.

Backend administration of the application can be difficult. There are constant upgrades, but it would be better to do just releases for smaller changes.

I have been using it for one year.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is average.

We have a very easy and straightforward way of installing Spotfire at our company. Since it is a self-service tool, it is available for everyone via our IT store.

Spotfire is an easy-to-use yet powerful tool. Though the administration can get tricky and a little difficult, it is worth it for the efficiency and optimization it provides for our users. Overall, it is a stable and powerful application.

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.

The following features are the most valuable to me:

• The ability to analyze your data quickly
• Extensibility: Quintus consultants develop QuintusVisuals and custom extensions using the Spotfire SDK.

In a previous job, I implemented a signaling system for calls coming in from the first line support desk. I placed Spotfire on top of a small live data sheet. It reloaded Spotfire with an external script and exported the analysis to HTML. After that, another script (created by a co-worker) ran to extract the contents and place the items in an automated web page, where tabs were switched every couple of seconds.

This tool was even able to run in the Network Operation Center on a big screen.

I'd like to see the following improvements:

• Configuration options (properties screens are too crowded)
• Licensing system: Make it more clear or get rid of the special groups and their special tick boxes that can only activate on that specific group.
• Enhance multiple scales in line and bar charts to grouped scales (group numerical, percentage etc. columns).

I have used this solution for about seven years.

In the recent version of Spotfire, 7.5 or 7.6, I was able to corrupt my webplayer services deployment with no way to restore it. I had to re-install it. Luckily, this is very quick to do.

Technical support provided very fast response times and helpful people. Excellent.

Initial setup was a straightforward process.

Because we are a Spotfire partner, we have the ability to deploy Spotfire in-house.

I tried to evaluate a version of Tableau but it felt hard to configure and not as easy as I’m used to with Spotfire.

It’s a business tool, but it’s always a good thing to have IT stand behind your decision when implementing it.

In my opinion, TIBCO Spotfire is the best tool that really serves the business analysis needs.

The feature most valuable to me is the incorporation of analytical techniques such as K-Means and ETL.

Reporting and dashboarding became quite easy. It is much faster and more robust than other BI or visualisation tools.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Multiple Interactive Layers
• More Built-In Visualisations.
• Dropdown and Hierarchy Filtering

I have used the solution for two years.

We did not encounter any issues with deployment, stability, or scalability.

Customer service and technical support are good.

I have used Tableau for the same amount of time. Spotfire has its own advantages in transforming data and analytical functions.

The initial setup is complex when you use Spotfire Server.

A vendor team implemented the solution.

It provides a great ROI.

Pricing is just fine.

Self-service analytics and easy visualisation are the most valuable features of this product to me. It shows where you are fetching data from, in the same way that you like to have a data model for a database. If you made a mistake in building a table, you need to start all over, there is no way to change it. That takes a lot of time.

This saves time in the analysis of the data structure and in fixing issues in the data structure of data tables.

It gives us better insight into data, taking things out of Excel and sharing solutions. We save many millions of dollars.

I would like it to be easier to see how data is combined and when a user changes. It would help when creating complex Spotfire files.

I have used this solution for 15 years.

Deployment is easy and stable.

Scaling was harder with prior versions, but better since 7.5.

I rate customer service 8/10.

I rate technical support 9/10.

The initial setup was simple, but that was 15 years ago. We are now at >10,000 users.

Implementation was performed by an in-house team with specialized contractors.

We looked at PowerBI, Tableau and Lumira. On features and on deployment in large organisations, Spotfire scores very well.

The following features are the most valuable to me:

• Ability to import data from disparate sources and manipulate/transform that data
• Ability to create visualizations that communicate insight
• Integration with R

This application has reduced the amount of time we spend manipulating data in Excel.

Allow insert columns to be changed after the initial operation. Currently, if an insert columns operation needs to be changed, the user must replace the entire table and this could involve significant rework.

Expand the statistical modeling functions.

Allow lines in line charts to be formatted.

I have used this solution for 3.5 years.

I have found that the manuals for deployment can be lacking in detail and explanation. I frequently open help desk tickets when working on installations.

I rate technical support 7/10 and getting better.

I know that we had a vendor team do the initial installation but have done all upgrades and additional product (Stats Services) installations ourselves. Again, the manuals are often lacking in detail and explanation.

Spotfire seems to be more expensive than other tools and negotiating with the vendor can be difficult. They could make purchasing the product a lot easier by being more transparent on pricing and having the same pricing or pricing tiers for all customers. Customers absolutely hate this negotiation process because it is not transparent, and also because the negotiations seem to take a long time. Be transparent and fair.

I have only used Spotfire. Every oil and gas company I have worked for uses it.

The vendor has historically provided two updates per year, although there can be more. In my opinion, updates twice a year with new features is pretty good given the amount of testing required to rollout an updated version of the product.

Also, if you find defects in the software and report them to their HD, they will notify you when hotfixes have been created, and they are pretty good about pushing out hotfixes for known issues.