TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

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. 

We utilize the solution for real-time analytics. We have some IoT devices connected to the dashboard, allowing us to view analytics related to the devices for our clients in the energy sectors.

TIBCO Spotfire can be connected to the cloud or deployed on-premise. TIBCO also offers cloud servers for cloud deployment.

The most valuable feature is the map visuals that help us connect to the geo-specialized data which is more advanced than other solutions.

We encountered difficulties connecting the special data sets, as the post data set did not contain any shared columns, making it difficult to establish a connection between the data sets. It would be beneficial if we had a feature to assist us in connecting to the pages of our special data, thus allowing us to the relationships easily.

I have been using the solution for five months.

TIBCO Spotfire is a stable solution that is able to handle a large data set and continue working efficiently.

The technical support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We had a few drag-and-drop items and some recommendations. Depending on the data sets the deployment can be completed within two days.

In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend TIBCO Spotfire.

• 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.

Data discovery is very simple.

Improved data wrangling (7.8)

Building a dashboard is very fast, even if you have limited IT skills.

You can retrieve data from a database without using SQL and integrate data from different sources (Excel, CSV, database, and so on).

Predictive Models incorporated in the dashboard(TERR-R-S-Matlab)

Integration with Tibbr

1. Add more visualization types. The number of charts available out of the box in Spotfire can be enhanced. I know there is a Custom Extension, JSViz, to integrate D3 visualizations. Last year I had a look but I remember there were limitations in using this extension and anyway it requires a Java script knowledge.
2. Provide the capability to trigger a Python script on marking change. It's only possible to trigger an R script on marking change. In my experience, considering customers requests and forum discussions it's a feature requested . Using some tricks can be achieved but it should be out of the box.

I used it for 2 years.

Deployment is very simple.

Sometimes the Spotfire client crashes when you test a Python script.

There is an issue with the web player exhibiting the same behavior in all browsers. Sometimes, the property control in the test area is resized or not well displayed.

Scalability improved in the new sw versions (7.5 and higher).

With the new architecture (7.5 and higher) load balancing for the web player is out of the box. Easy setup of spotfire server cluster for fault tolerance.

I had a few issues with the product, and they were quickly solved by the support team.

It is simple in my opinion. If you find any issue: Read the installation manual!!

• 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.

• Embedded R scripts
• Mapserver

These features are key to separating BI tools from ETL tools. RDMS have ETL tools that run the transfer protocol. Some BI tools in the oil and gas industry have ETL features that take the place of accessing the database directly. In the big data ecosystem, the data cleansing process takes place before ETL processes are run to integrate the data. On the other hand, in RDMS, the data cleansing takes place after the data has been imported from disparate system into the database.

I used it in an academic setting as a resource to learn R scripting. I have found it an easy API to learn.

I encourage a seamless integration with Hadoop; a direct connection to Hadoop server from a session in Spotfire. This might exist for the Spotfire server connectivity, but I do not work with the server version.

I have infrequently used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I haven't used technical support.

I have used several BI tools and still maintain this diversity in product usage.

Initial setup was somewhat complex on the client’s system. I am not familiar with the server installation.

It is economical to consider desktop client usage when possible.

I also use QlkView, Tableau and MicroStrategy.

Consider how you intend to use the product before investing in functionality that you might not need.

We use it for reporting and metrics.

We used it pretty heavily in gathering data, which goes to our VPs. They are able to base their next revenue planning based on this metric. So, it has been invaluable.

It does very well at collecting metrics and giving us concise reports based on what we need.

We would like an easier way to get the product to the cloud. Right now, we have the on-premise version, and we would like to find a way to make it easier to migrate it over to the cloud. We want something that is easier to get over to AWS.

Its stability has been good. We experienced crashes a few versions back, but the current version that we're on has been stable.

We are heavily into AWS; the company is about 75% into AWS. 

We have over 10,000 employees with about 5000 active users of the product.

I would recommend evaluating it against other products. When I got onto the team, we didn't evaluate it against any other products. It was the one that was already in-house, so we went with it. If somebody wants to evaluate it for use, I would recommend that they have two or three other products that they could compare it against.

We use it a lot with TIBCO EMS. It works relatively well with that. It is able to gather performance metrics on it.

We are using the non-AWS version.

It's not specific, but in general, the product's ability to handle large volumes of data through its in-memory OLAP is valuable, as well as its data visualization capabilities.

For most organizations which are generally not so tech-savvy, people usually rely on Excel to do their data analytics. But once the size of data hits a certain level, it becomes very inefficient to manage your Excel files. Once you are at this stage, you could either get a developer to come up with a solution (most likely an enterprise tool or some sort of OLAP database solution), or you could get a stand-alone version of Spotfire.

If you have someone in your team with a little bit of database development skill, learning to use Spotfire is not too difficult and you could save time and money on implementing a full-blown solution by IT consultants.

Our old executive reports were heavily text-based. People responsible for generating reports would spend a lot of time writing a report that nobody read. Once we implemented Spotfire, the reports have become data-driven and visually appealing.

We carefully designed the analytic report in a way that condenses text-based information into visual information that is easy to digest. It is true that you could also achieve the same outcome with Excel or other MS Office tools, but with Spotfire's data visualization capabilities, the job is much easier.

I'm not a technical expert, but based on my experience from the user/designer point of view, the level of visual customization (e.g., how graphical objects are displayed) needs more flexibility.

Learning to use the scripting language (Python) proved a challenge for me personally due to lack of good documentation, and the scripting editor is not so user-friendly. If you want greater flexibility and more powerful features than what's offered, you may need to hire a Spotfire developer to do the coding.

I have used the solution for around two to three years.

Generally speaking, the software is quite stable (both the application and back-end server). However, we did experience application crashes from time to time when memory usage is heavy, but we aren't technical experts, so we could not identify exactly when/why it crashed.

In terms of its ability to handle a big volume of data, it's highly scalable. But in my organization in which Spotfire was used mainly as a reporting tool, we found it a bit challenging to scale up our report configuration. For example, with MS Access, you create a master layout which can be used for several projects or customers. In Spotfire, we ended up having to create separate master layouts for every project. When there was a request to modify the report layout, it was a tedious task.

I haven't had enough experience dealing with technical support to answer this question.

We used a combination of out-of-the-box software solutions and Excel/Access before we added Spotfire to make our lives a bit easier. We did not switch completely from existing tools to Spotfire. It's more about adding Spotfire in order to enhance our existing system.

Our requirements were simple (only at the department level in a large organization). So the initial setup of the Spotfire server was straightforward and was done within a few days. The main issue was obtaining security credentials from the IT department to access database servers we need to generate reports.

A less-straightforward step is when we needed to design our analytical reports that meet the requirements of our executives. Here, it is nothing to do with Spotfire or any other software but more about good communication with the stakeholders.

My advice based on personal experience would be to start small and scale up when you're certain that Spotfire is the right tool for you. In our organization, we started with a couple of stand-alone licenses for one year. Only after that, we decided to implement a server-based license to expand our user base for the whole department.

We tried Spotfire and liked it, so we did not have the need to evaluate other options. However, other well-known (perhaps more popular) options include Tableau and QlikView. You can refer to the Gartner's Magic Quadrant report on BI tools.

In addition to what I have written regarding pricing and licensing, I suggest that having an in-house power user in your organization - who understands both the tool and your needs - is highly critical.