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Integrating Spotfire with web applications
Updated March 14, 2014

Integrating Spotfire with web applications

Harry Gu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

  • Spotfire makes it so easy to visualize a large amount of data in the graph of your choice. The filtering mechanism is simple while powerful. The interactive marking feature allows you to drill down to the data very quickly. Dynamic aggregation is really handy. All of these can be applied to one or more tabular data sets with no need of up-front dimensional modeling.
  • The architecture of the product is sound. A .net API can be used to customize existing or create new visualizations that can be deployed to Web Player and Spotfire Professional. Spotfire Server provides support for security, deployment and management of the library items and so on. Each of these server components are fully fault-tolerant and production ready.
  • For version 4.5 or earlier, the loading of the data was slow when the data set got larger. Version 5.0 or later should have made this much better, even though I didn't have a chance to use it.
  • Spotfire Server needed some polish. It was Java-based, in contrast to .net-based Web Player. The interfaces and documentation for customization and extension were poor.
  • Earlier versions did not have support for non-relational data, which was introduced in later versions.
  • I don't have quantifiable ROI data.
We are unsure about renewal, not because of unhappiness with the product but because of shifting internal priorities. We may have to shift resources to other priorities for a limited time.

Product Usage

  • Tibco Spotfire is one of the leading Data Visualization tools on the market. We had a need to provide our customers the capability of doing rapid analysis on performance of their campaigns with highly-visual web UI. Spotfire was a good fit for that.
  • Our product was SaaS based. The design of Spotfire's Web Player and Spotfire Server made it easy to integrate with web applications.
  • Integration with the existing security mechanism to ensure only authorized the data is visible via Spotfire web UI.
  • Dynamically select and connect to multiple data sources based on the current user request. This involved some customization in the Spotfire back end.

Evaluation and Selection

Tibco Sportfire Web Player 4.0, Spotfire Professional 4.0 and Spotfire Server 3.3

Implementation

The implementation was successful and met our expectations. Certain parts of it were challenging because of some special needs we had, for example, customization of data access, etc. But overall, it's been a positive experience.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Tibco provides extensive on-line training courses, which are mostly helpful. They are also designed for different roles and levels.
Depending on the depth, regular users can pick it up with self-learning. But for in-depth development, training is needed and recommended.

Support

They have good technical support. They've solved a number of technical issues for us, even though sometimes it took time for them to release the patches. The consultant we've worked with was knowledgeable and helpful. Also, the discussion board on Tibco's web site was very active and helpful.
Yes - The product is a complex product. Unless it's only for casual usage, top-notch support is needed. Especially for version upgrades and customization, etc.