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Highly intuitive visualization capability.
November 12, 2012

Highly intuitive visualization capability.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Tibco Spotfire 4.0

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

  • Spotfire is a very intuitive design tool. It’s very easy to manipulate X axes and Y axes to build visualizations. The tool does not have a heavy learning curve. It’s also well-designed in that once you learn one thing, it’s quite easy to use that knowledge to do something else. The UI is quite consistent. Once you know one thing, it’s easy to do other things.
  • Marking visualization components and filtering for drill-down into the underlying data are very intuitive and easy to understand.
  • The tool is also very easy to customize. For example, the SDK allows for custom visualizations.
  • Ease of use though is primordial. We did not want to deploy a tool that was so difficult to use that we would not get any internal adoption. The primary goal was to bring in a product that could be used by people of all different skill levels and would be widely adopted across the organization.
  • On the back end, when designing visualizations, actually getting data into the product can be a bit esoteric. For a technical person, writing SQL queries is relatively straightforward. But the product has been designed for less technical users. All users are forced to use a GUI which is poorly designed and very difficult to use. The Information Designer (used for setting up data sources and creating information database queries) is the weakest part of the product and needs to be redesigned.
  • Data volume. Ours is a very data-intensive business. We produce Terabytes of data. This huge volume of data is not always practical to pull in. The desktop version of the product loads all data into RAM and not on disk which can be problematic. Obviously, it can only load what data your physical machine has resources for. Once you have all the data, of course, it’s very easy to filter and drill down and the product works very well. The problem is the hard RAM limit. Tableau works around this problem by doing some smarter caching so that you are not pulling everything into RAM. This is not really a problem for sales, but for engineering where the volumes of data tend to be very large, the overhead can be prohibitive.
  • Ease of use. It’s very easy to get something running quickly – very little wasted time.
  • Queries are re-usable. Every time a query is constructed, it is available as a reusable module of SQL. This is particularly useful for Sales which is often looking at data sets which are a slight variant of an earlier query. This is very efficient and again is related to speed to information.
  • 4.5. is a very stable product with very few glitches. The product has come a very long-way (earlier versions have been far less stable). The Web Player in particular was once very buggy and unstable, but is now rock solid.
• The other main contender was Tableau. The main reason we chose Spotfire was the strength of the API. We use this for things like building custom charts and custom authentication (LDAP integration).

Using Spotfire

100 - • About 50 people use it once a week or more. About 100 people have access, but use it only occasionally.
• The main users are the various engineering groups (they use it for data pipeline validation)
• Sales department also uses quite a bit. They don’t know SQL, so they like to use the tool to see how they are doing.
  • Engineering groups use the product primarily for data pipeline validation. In addition to the standard platform, we also use Automation Services and Web Player.
  • Automation Services. This is a scheduling tool. You can use it to automate a series of steps such as: Open report / Send email to individuals / Save report back to library.
  • Web Player. This is a web-based version of the tool for consuming reports built by others
• We are looking at buying more licenses. Ultimately, we would like to have an unlimited site license so that all employees have automatic access.

Evaluating Spotfire and Competitors

• We used lots of home-grown tools and free options e.g. SQL queries with data dumped to Excel / Hicharts (open source)

Spotfire Implementation

Implementation went well. No issues here.
  • Implemented in-house

Spotfire Training

  • Self-taught
I rolled out training internally: There are two separate versions of training:
o Designer training for the desktop version concentrating on back-end SQL
o Basic training for the Web player for less technical staff

Spotfire Support

No
We have the Middle Tier for support which gives us access to support from Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. We do not need more than this.
• No issues. Quite responsive.

Using Spotfire

• Very intuitive and fast to learn. Usability is one of the premier strengths of the software.

Spotfire Reliability

• The system has never gone down unexpectedly. It’s very stable
• The desktop version really depends on resources you have available and is limited by RAM. This performance limitation is not applicable to the Web player which is a server side component.

Integrating Spotfire

  • We have hooked the Web Player up to our Intranet by loading it in an iFrame on our Intranet page.