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Insight into Spotfire
Updated November 10, 2014

Insight into Spotfire

Shakeel Muhajir | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

3.x to 5.x

Modules Used

  • Spotfire professional, Web Player, Enterprise, Information Modeling, Admin

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

I have helped Oil & Gas clients in implementing several Drilling, Completions, Production, Surveillance, Reserves and O & G Accounting Use Cases. Some of these analyses help users analyze near real-time data; others are previous day or weekly/Quarterly/Annual data. Data Relationships and Statistical analysis is another popular areas amongst Geologists, Engineers and Engineering Techs.
  • Enables you to visualize and analyze data.
  • Perform predictive analytics based on statiscal models.
  • Interaction with the data which enables slicing & dicing of the data based on specific requirements which can be very fluid and change from hour to hour
  • Share analyses with other team members, partners and vendors.
  • Connect to disparate data sources for analysis.
  • Run more interactive sessions/meetings without having to say, "I'll get back to you on that".
  • It's an interactive visualization and BI tool, so if you are looking to generate static formatted reports or invoices then this is probably not the tool you need.
I work with several different clients so I have seen it being implemented for 20-30 users and I have also seen it being implemented for thousands of users. But one thing is fairly consistent, the user-base grows very rapidly.
Basic Text file, MS Excel and Relational Database connectivity is out of the box. You may need to get the MS SQL Server, Oracle database drivers, though. Apart from that, now you have dozens of pre-built specialized connectors to either other popular platforms like SSAS, MATLAB, TERADATA, etc. or other Industry specific popular tools which makes it extremely viable to use Spotfire for disparate systems and be able to analyze using just Spotfire platform.
Highly like their Web Player environment which makes it very easy to share with others. Process of publishing analyses to the Web Player environment is also very easy. On the collaboration side, you'll need Tibbr configured to make use of the Collaboration Panels in Spotfire.
Extremely easy to develop and configure visualizations using drag & drop or Property Sheet. Spotfire was planning on releasing some additional charts in 6.x version, I would like to see them in the future releases shortly.
The usual suspects:
  • Microsoft
  • Tableau
  • Qlickview
  • Microstrategy

Spotfire v6.x - Great improvement to the Map Chart. Another big improvement is being able to move parts of analysis from one dxp to another, which saves you a lot of time and enables multi-user development.

Spotfire professional v5.5 has a new architecture and built-in support for statistical modeling. There is a huge improvement in performance and broader statistical support.

Using Spotfire

5 - We are a consulting company, so our primary use of the product is to provide consulting and training services to clients.
5 - Consultants, trainers and installers. Apart from the dedicated resources, we are growing the team with in-house training to support our growing client-base.
  • General business intelligence; more specifically, data interaction and visualization.
  • Identifying hidden trends, slicing & dicing the data without having to depend on IT or other developers.
  • Depending on industry: Predictive Analytics, optimizing production, cost & process efficiencies.
Spotfire is one of the best products in its domain and Spotfire is committed to making substantial investment and releasing a new version every 6 months. Support for "Big Data" is yet another reason to recommend.

Evaluating Spotfire and Competitors

As a part of a consulting company, I have used several products but most recently I have been working on the Microsoft BI stack.

Spotfire Implementation

Installtion required some assistance from the Spotfire resources. The basic install is fairly straightforward but some assistance is required in integrating it with Active Directory and enabling authentication.
  • Implemented in-house

Spotfire Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
We provide training services based on customer feedback, and our training is highly-rated.
Online training is fine, but the instructor-led is better.
It is very easy to use, and a lot of users got started without any formal training. But a formal structured training course definitely compresses the learning period.

Spotfire Support

Yes
Spotfire is a very important and an intrinsic part of most our clients' core businesses. They cannot afford to not have the backing of qualified individuals to help keep it up and running (even if the product is very robust and doesn't need a great deal of support).
Spotfire has been very supportive and responsive. They have great, highly-qualified resources.

Using Spotfire

Easy to install & configure. Once installed, very easy to use, intuitive and rich product from the end-user perspective. Keep in mind, the product is for data visualization & analysis and predictive analytics and is not a traditional reporting platform.

Spotfire Reliability

Very high availability with minimum maintenance.
Considering the amount of data Spotfire supports, and the ability to connect to so many different data sources, the performance is really strong; specially, if you are working with v5.5

Integrating Spotfire

  • Several Oil & Gas specific products.
  • Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Oracle database.
  • SAP
  • Web Services.
Some integrations are very simple, out-of-the-box. Others require add-ons provided by Spotfire called Advance Data Services and OpenSpirit.
  • None that I didn't already mention.
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