TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

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. 

At my previous company, I was both a developer and a software administrator. It was an upstream oil and gas company — exploration, drilling, and completion. Due to some financial issues (not being able to compete well in the market), they shut down their Houston office and laid off quite a few people. 

Spotfire started putting a lot of high-quality, online videos out there that are specifically geared toward things that clients are looking for. This is great because no one wants to sign up for a $2,000 training class or watch three hours of videos just to figure out something that can be explained in 10 minutes. I think that's a great thing.

When Spotfire released version 10.0, they came out with a brand new UI and made some pretty drastic changes to the user interface. With the first release of anything, there's always a lot of criticism and room for improvement. Still, the design of the UI could be improved. There are small issues like file name extensions that are hard to read, for example. They really improved their database connectivity. In version 10.0, they added a lot of great improvements that consumers have wanted for a long time. Regardless, some basic design changes in the UI would make it a little more intuitive for users.

In terms of the next release, from a data analytics standpoint, I think that it's a pretty strong product. I know they just made some recent improvements — now they have a Python programming interface in Spotfire. That was one of the things that I had wanted for a long time.

Some minor changes to the user interface to make navigation a little more intuitive would be nice. Other than that, the solution is really good. 

There's an online Spotfire community that is underused. I used to log into it a lot to try and have discussions with other users. I don't know if it's just that the users are working on so many different things that sometimes they're just not interested in talking with other users, but I think the user community should be promoted more. There's a lot of valuable information out there but it's up to the consumers to make use of it. I think that's something that they should promote more.

I also think they should limit the number of releases. I'm not a fan of their release schedule; sometimes they may have two types of releases at the same time. Basically, they have both short-term and long-term releases. They put out a long-term release every year to year-and-a-half. At the same time, they'll have five or six short-term releases in between. Sometimes, the short-term releases will have a critical upgrade that clients may want, but often, the short releases aren't supported as well as the long releases. So, if you're going to upgrade to a short-term release, you have to be willing to upgrade often.

My previous company had over 600 users. By the time I would get one version into production, we literally went right back into putting the next release into development — testing and getting it ready for production. I worked a lot with people in various business groups to help with testing and user acceptance — it got to the point where it was requiring a lot of them. Some of these people were engineers and they would say, "We can't be putting all this time into helping you test." So, we had to work around that. The release schedule is something I would change.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

There are other really good products on the market, but I haven't seen anything that is light years ahead of Spotfire as far as capabilities go. It's been around for a long time; It has been a leading product years before many of these other products were even on the market. They have a great history.

I have almost 10 years of experience with Spotfire.

From a scalability standpoint, I would say it's pretty fantastic. Not that Spotfire itself is massively scalable. It's a pretty impressive analytical tool for developing visualizations and sharing them across the enterprise with your organization or business group.

TIBCO has built out an entire analytical platform. You can use Spotfire to connect to data sources, but let's say you wanted to stream data, in real-time; in this case, you may be working with almost a terabyte of data a day. Presently, there's really not any analytical application out there on the market that's going to do that very well, but you can scale with a data stream from TIBCO, which helps you access your data in real-time.

It really doesn't matter how much data you're working with, but they also have the business enterprise and TIBCO data analytics. TIBCO data analytics just opens up the door for any kind of truly advanced analytics that you're working with. You can insert real machine learning code right into your analysis.

Technical support was always very responsive. They were probably more responsive than I was — there were a couple of times when I even had to open up an issue with them. If you don't get back to them within a certain number of days, they'll change the status of your service request. They'll put it on a temporary hold and then they'll close it out eventually. They're very responsive.

I wasn't there when they set it up, but I did perform two upgrades myself while I was there, and it was fairly easy. It's changed a lot over the years and it's actually become quite easy to install and to get up and running. Roughly 10 years ago, when I did the first implementation, it was really difficult. There were five of us sitting around a table with a 300-page PDF that we had printed out — it took us an entire weekend to figure it out. Now, if you wanted to, you could actually install Spotfire in the cloud and actually have it up and running, connecting with data, in an hour or less. To me, that's pretty impressive.

licensing-wise, I didn't really have any involvement.

In my role as a consultant, I would work with clients and, from a software evaluation standpoint, I would say, "Let's take a look at your business requirements. Let's see what's the right tool for you. Should you go with something that's easy-to-use, right out of the box? Or do you want something that's a little more advanced, based on your users and your business requirements?" Quite often, because it is very scalable and it suits many different company sizes and business requirements, Spotfire was the right choice.

I would definitely recommend Spotfire. If you're considering using Spotfire, just be sure to implement and scale it properly. Too often, many companies will buy a fantastic product, but they have very immature users. If you're going to buy a strong product, you need to put a strong emphasis on training and developing your users. As a consultant, I've seen a lot of companies that say, "Spotfire can't do this."  Sure enough, after I'd look into it, the answer was always undertrained users.

• The advanced settings in the dialog box for visualization options are comprehensive and easy to use.
• The filters available in the data panel for data exploration are responsive, even on large data sets.

It has improved internal audits in customers that implemented the enterprise server by increasing the size and scope of data sets analyzed and tested. This makes the process more automated.

Some visualizations that were customized did not display well when published to the web server. I suspect it had more to do with the specifications for that particular deliverable than with the solution's capabilities.

We have used the solution for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are only a small implementation for three to five analysts.

We haven't used the technical support facility.

Other customers implemented IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, or Tableau.

We don't know about the initial setup.

We can't offer any advice on this issue.

We evaluated Tableau. Our decision to go with Tibco Spotfire came down to the availability of a developer/analyst skillset with the tool.

Consider how this fits within enterprise data governance. There are no real savings on time spent preparing data for analysis.

• Good data transformation tools.
• Excellent connectivity to different data sources.
• Good forecasting and statistical capabilities.
• Can be hosted or cloud based.

• It has enabled staff to easily create reports/dashboards without having to involve a developer in most cases.
• It has made it easier for users to create their own reusable visualizations/widgets.
• For more advanced users it facilitates better integration of the languages used (Python, Javascript, etc.) and the tools.

• Spotfire is poor at pixel perfect embedding in a website.
• It can be difficult to remove the Spotfire branding for embedded pages as well.
• It is a very expensive license model.
• DBA is still required for optimization of some report queries and their underlying SQL.

We used this solution for four years up to the beginning of 2016.

Ours was a hosted solution with two servers. The main Spotfire server required very few restarts and it was normally down to a user creating a crazy report for millions of rows of data.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. However, the cost is prohibitive.

The technical support is above average. Our Spotfire support was handled by a Spotfire partner who was quick to respond. TIBCO's website does also provide a wealth of information through a knowledge base, community forums, technical block articles etc. They provided a few licenses for a development system so we could test patches etc out before deploying to our production system.

We used Oracle Portal. We switched as the technology was becoming dated and our analysts wanted something they could use themselves with minimal development involvement and to be easy to deploy their dashboards/reports to their users.

I wasn't involved with the setup as our IT team did this. They didn't complain about it afterwards.

Tibco is an expensive product and although we purchased it initially for a small user group, as usage grew licencing costs meant we had to be very proactive with users who had licences but were not using them. There didn't appear to be any options to reduce the per user licencing costs by changing to a per processor model unless you were spending £1m+.

We looked at Tableau, Qlikview, Jaspersoft, Oracle.

• Tibco brought Jaspersoft recently which offers far better options for embedding/pixel perfect, however they are still in the process of integrating the two.
• Write your needs down as well as any specific requirements.
• Get the Tibco Partner to show you a demo against your data.
• If it's only for a small number of users look at their cloud solution rather than hosted.

• Ease of accessing, aggregating and visualizing data sources
• The amount of data that the product can manage in memory

Spotfire provides connectors and data driver support for about 40 unique data sources including all of the common structured ones like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc., plus non-structured sources like HTML, RSS feeds, data warehouses and fast data platforms. All of the different data sources can be merged or mashed up in one “viz”. The size limit of data is the 64-bit address space or 16 terabytes, basically unlimited. I ran one POC on a dataset over 100 GB and Spotfire performed as well as it does with small datasets. Note, the data load time is roughly proportional to the size of the dataset, but the access to the data once it is loaded in memory in Spotfire is just about the same on any size dataset.

Use of Spotfire has almost eliminated people doing cumbersome, manual ETL efforts in files and other products from transactional source systems and the corporate data warehouse.

Administration functionality can be improved more by moving the rest of the command-line effort to a web-based UI. Otherwise, just keep adding more functions that otherwise most customers have to create as custom functions. Add a Shut Down and Exit option in the event of an unresponsive session, usually due to data connectivity issues.

I have been using it for eight years(starting with version 4.0).

There is very little instability until the memory of the host reaches 0% availability.

No issues with scalability.

Almost perfect support, 9. The only issue I had was understanding some of the techs verbally due to “English not their primary language”. WebEx and chatting was the workaround.

I did not have any experience with a similar solution before Spotfire.

Initial setup is very simple and works as documented.

Negotiate, plan for three years out and triple whatever your best forecast is for growth. Spotfire usage typically will grow like a wildfire in high winds and dry forest.

I did not do the evaluations but a comparison of Tableau was evaluated and failed to meet data size requirements and in-memory capacity.

We have two primary use cases. One is for the data exploration and the second is for deploying the dashboards for the specific business use cases.

There are two features that I have found most valuable. One is its ability to customize the dashboards when it comes to the evaluation. If you have to deploy visualizations you can actually do it based on the business needs and even customize them for the business prep centers. Other tools are not as flexible as Spotfire's ability to integrate HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The second feature is its ability to handle a large amount of data, which is also something very unique about it.

In terms of what could be improved, when it comes to data manipulation there are features which are good, but one of the features which has really been missing in Spotfire is an offline ability for data manipulation. In Qlik you are able to simply manipulate the member's data, manage it, and build data through SQL queries. This means you can actually do your data modeling offline. If we had this type of capability in Spotfire that would make it a very superior product with respect to the others in the market. Now it is hard to manage offline.

You really have to rely on the external sources to do the entire data modeling for the exploration or for the visualization development. But what Qlik has also started offering is that they have a wider capability where you can actually have offline data and do your data modeling through the SQL. This means you can actually manipulate a member's data before you utilize it in a visualization. So you really don't have to rely a lot on the enterprise source, and you can manage data in your own source and then deploy the dashboard supporting this.

Additionally, support could be improved. Lastly, the third feature which I would really recommend improving is the diagnosing and monitoring tools, which are really missing in the overall portfolio of Spotfire.

I have been using TIBCO Spotfire for five, six years.

It is pretty stable.

TIBCO Spotfire is a scalable product. 

We have more than 3,000 people using it.

We do plan to use it more in the future. We really recommend the new capabilities and really try to simplify it as we go.

We have access to the technical support, though from a technical support perspective, I do feel this is one of the areas which can be improved. There is not a lot of self-service available in the technical admin support. That means that for almost every single issue you may have to rely on the technical support because the online materials are not enough.

Before using TIBCO Spotfire we were using Power BI. However, we were really not able to find a good scalable solution with Power BI.

The initial setup was easy. It took roughly a couple of days.

There was a team for the initial setup. A couple of engineers.

TIBCO Spotfire is an expensive product.

I would totally recommend this product. 

On a scale of one to ten I would rate TIBCO Spotfire an eight.