Spotfire will "light" up your data
July 19, 2018
Spotfire will "light" up your data
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
TIBCO Cloud Spotfire
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire
We are using Spotfire in a manufacturing environment at our US location to serve as a single point of truth for metrics, analytics, and data. We have many disparate systems, but with Spotfire's many native connection functions, we are able to tie many different data sources together for better insights.
It addresses the problem of having to "hunt and search" for data. Many of our users are staff members who do not frequently use all of our systems but might need data from each of them. Spotfire gives a "one-stop shop" and common interface that makes it easy for the users to access to drill down to the data they need on the fly when putting together presentations, or deep dive analysis.
It addresses the problem of having to "hunt and search" for data. Many of our users are staff members who do not frequently use all of our systems but might need data from each of them. Spotfire gives a "one-stop shop" and common interface that makes it easy for the users to access to drill down to the data they need on the fly when putting together presentations, or deep dive analysis.
- Connecting to a variety of data sources; basically no matter what your backend systems are (from Excel to huge ERPs and data lakes), Spotfire can connect to it and provide suggestions as to the best way to visualize your data
- Ability to quickly slice and dice data and save that "view" as a bookmark. Not only are users quickly able to access data and filter just what they need, they can save a particular set of filters or "view" via the bookmark function so the need to create multiple views with the same dataset isn't necessary by the analyst.
- Quick and easy to design and publish. Basically, if you have a dataset, Spotfire can quickly visualize it for you. It's possible to embed data if you have large datasets for performance or connect directly to a backend system to get real-time data.
- Using community suggestions or ideas to quickly implement features. Simple things like using calculated values in other expressions would give designers lots of flexibility without having to do lots of data massaging and setup where source systems might not communicate together very well.
- Automation for updating data tables in the cloud environment. This is possible with an on-premise solution, but we need the ability to FTP or transfer files to the cloud services and have a schedule to refresh updated files.
- More flexibility over visualization design options. Need the ability to sort bars by value when they are in a hierarchy. Need to be able to stack bars when using two data sources. Need more functionality around colors and conditions/expressions.
I have evaluated Tableau, which is very similar to Spotfire. At the time of evaluation, it didn't have the necessary connections to the type of data lakes we needed.
- Self-taught
Online training would have been beneficial to ask specific questions you have about individual analyses. I have been mostly self-taught which, at the beginning, is a little slower, but you are forced to quickly learn the best ways to design visualizations specific to your use case instead of general examples.
No other integrations, but something we might consider in the future.