TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

I work with a big bank in Azerbaijan. We have created a data warehouse and use TIBCO Spotfire. I have implemented this application in three banks.

We primarily use it for processing. I have experience and I understand the technical requirements so that we can design any report or we can use SQL links, or Postgres, et cetera.

It's a dynamic solution. There's dynamic reporting in TIBCO. It's very easy to add Power BI. With Power BI, if you want to create dynamic reporting, and dynamic dashboards, in Power BI you must create a lot of code files, however. It's very useful or it's very easy to create the dynamic dashboard in TIBCO Spotfire.

The solution is stable. 

The pricing is good.

It's scalable. 

We'd like better dashboard integrations. 

The initial setup can be difficult. 

The design of the solution could be updated. 

I've worked with the solution for seven or eight years. I have a rather large background with the solution. 

It's quite stable and reliable. The performance is great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. After working with the solution for seven years, I've never had any emergencies to contend with.

The scalability is good. It's not a problem to expand it. You can do all kinds of reporting, and as often as you want. It's very fast.

We have about 50 planned users on the product right now. 

At the present time, we don't have any plans to upgrade this system, however, we have a plan after the new year, or 2023, to look at everything. We might look at usage then.

The solution does not have good documentation or a strong community to help you.

That said, I' e never had issues that required me to directly reach out to technical support. We do have a partner in the region, and if we needed help, we would reach out to them to get assistance. We might need to reach out maybe once a year. It is never very often.

I also have experience with and am certified in Power BI. However, I've never used it in a banking environment. 

If we use Power BI, there are very good colors or a lot of dashboards and there are machine learning opportunities, et cetera. However, it is not easy to create dynamic dashboards. With TIBCO Spotfire, there are not very good color systems or nice UX designs. However, the reporting is very good. We only need reporting, which is why we choose to use TIBCO.

There were problems with the initial setup. There is not a lot of documentation for implementation. If you have any problems, you cannot easily find documentation for issues either. The community is okay, however, there is not enough information for solving problems. There are not really any tutorials to help you.

It's not user-friendly and pretty hard to deal with system settings. 

We do pay a yearly licensing fee. Three years ago, we paid for four years upfront. It's not overly expensive. 

We looked at Tableau, which is very good. I know Oracle BI is also a very strong system as well, as is QlikView.

I'm an end-user of the product. 

We are using both on-premises and cloud deployment of the product. We have a server, a TIBCO server, which we implemented. We have implemented several reports and have used the Spotfire design. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My daily tasks are related to data mining and TBICO Spotfire is one of the products that I use. We are a small group of geologists operating in a niche area who are analyzing geochemical data. Our backend database is MySQL and we use products such as Power BI, Tableau, and Spotfire to display data for the geochemists.

If we get dirty data in, we might use Spotfire to see what it is we actually have. This might include how many files we have and the file types, in the case where we have this massive data purchase or something similar.

We use Spotfire to slice and dice and see what we're looking at. But then at the end of the day, we end up just taking the data and loading it into Oracle tables. After we have figured out what we have, we might connect Spotfire to those data tables, to better display the different analyses that a geochemist needs.

The out-of-the-box features are simple and easy to use across the board. Some of the features that we use are bar charts, pie graphs, and cross tables. They are simple dashboards to show the different metrics on the data, and sometimes data quality, as well.

Personalising Spotfire, as a whole, is painful and is something that could be made easier. As a result, I'm not doing much coding.

The background process is something that I find difficult to work with, although that may be more related to company policy and procedures than it is to Spotfire. Specifically, having it on the servers for development and then moving to acceptance in production is not user-friendly. I understand why it's got to be done, so you don't mess up anything that's in production, but to me, it's a little bit antiquated. I think it could be more robust in how you pull in your data, from a database level. Using data in spreadsheets is very simple but when you start connecting to databases, it can be clunky and difficult to do.

I have been working with TIBCO Spotfire for approximately six years. My company has had a license for much longer than that.

Spotfire is stable, although sometimes it is slow. That may be related to the company and how the data is being rendered, and where our servers sit for the databases. I don't think that its' a fault of Spotfire because I've seen it work with real-time data really fast. It seems, however, the implementation can cause it to lag a little bit.

This is a scalable solution if you're not trying to customize it too much. If you can use what it comes with out of the box, I think it's very scalable and very simple to use. It's when you start having to make custom coding adjustments and whatnot, that it could be a pain because then only one person can fix it typically, and that's the person who initially worked on the coding.

We don't connect directly with TIBCO because we have our own technical support in the company. 

We also use Microsoft Power BI and Tableau to create views of the data.

As of last year, my company has been starting to move away from using Spotfire and focus on Power BI, only because it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. This means that it's easier to integrate. However, for now, we are still using both products.

Spotfire X was a big improvement from the previous versions. They now have an export option to PowerPoint, which was a large pain point in the past. Generally, this is not something I use personally. I create a web service and I give the links out for people to access it directly.

The initial setup is pretty simple. All we have to do is request a license, download it, and start using it. You can start bringing spreadsheets in, for example.

We are a small group within the company and we have dedicated groups within our organization for Spotfire support. We just tell them that we need a place on a server and they set it up. For the most part, deployment is straightforward.

We have an in-house team for deployment and maintenance, and they provide technical support to the rest of the company. It used to be a large team and they are very helpful. My understanding is that there was a reorganization and we now have only two people who are contacts for Spotfire support. At least in the past, if we needed help then it was easy and they were great.

Additional people have been brought in to assist us with Power BI, although I have not yet been using it regularly.

The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year.

As a data analyst, I am not in operations and don't have a say in which products we use.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Spotfire is to first speak with TIBCO to make sure that your data model and everything that operates in the background is implemented correctly. If it is done improperly then it may render slowly.

Don't assume that you know everything, the way we do in my company. There are times when we get something new and because it has to be done our way, we end up breaking it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

We provide services to other customers. We have multiple customers who are in the oil and gas industry. We use this software for managing clients' assets.  Creating analytical dashboards on different datasets from Wales and various other datasets they have from their enterprise software.  Everything is very well accumulated in one place using Spotfire.

There were a couple of issues with Spotfire. But in the new releases, they have they have covered them. We had some challenges with respect to what they will say, compatibility issues for formatting and importing. So but those were fixed and some performance related issues for bladder datasets. But now in the newer releases, it's it is it is working fine.

I have been using TIBCO Spotfire for 5 years. 

Fifty users are using the solution at present. 

The initial setup is complicated and needs experience and knowledge.

Five engineers are required for maintenance.

The solution is an affordable one. 

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10. 

We use this solution to provide our customers with a data analytics platform.

We particularly like the data angling feature of this solution. This gives us the ability to work on data transformations, join files, and carry out other data preparation tasks all in a single tool.

We also appreciate the data science function, which lets us evaluate our Python functions within the solutions interface and create your visualizations.

We would like to see some development in the visualization aspect of this solution, as they can currently only be configured in the cloud, which limits us to one endpoint. It would be helpful if this could be integrated with other tools.

We would also like the level of environment control that is possible with on-premises installations, to be available with cloud-based variants.

We have been working with this solution for nearly four years.

We have found this solution to be stable. However, for optimal stability the hardware requirements need to be identified by evaluating peak load scenarios, and then put in place.

This solution is easily scalable by adding extra machines to the cluster as needed, as long as you have the appropriate hardware requirement available.

There is excellent support available for this solution, as well as a lot of case studies available for use in the online community area. We have found that most of the problems that we face can be solved by consulting the community.

Positive

The initial setup of this solution is simple, and uniform, regardless of whether it is installed on-premises or via the cloud.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.