Item: Spotfire
Rating: 10
Author: Jonathan Tucker

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Spotfire across multiple departments, though we all have an engineering focus. We use it to address some daily/weekly reporting needs, but also, and more importantly, for data discovery/insights.

Pros and Cons

Cross tables. Most people call them pivot tables perhaps, from the excel version, but Spotfire does them so much better! Easier to build and arrange, and with tons more options than the excel pivot table.
Mapping. The improved mapping capabilities of Spotfire along with its ease of use, allow you to build fabulous looking maps very quickly.
Aggregation. Spotfire is built to aggregate, and it does this better and faster than anything else I know of.

Screen resolution. Spotfire has always struggled a bit with getting everything to fit on the screen and with printing/exporting to other applications.
Buttons. The latest version has moved a lot of the most used buttons, and put them into these sliding windows where you can't see them all the time as you could before. To me this is a great dis-service, because now I have to click multiple times to get to common functions.
Advanced coding. Spotfire offers a lot of expandability through the Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R, but this requires an insurmountable knowledge of what different objects are called, and of the unique programming language that it uses. They market this feature heavily as one of the best things about Spotfire, but it is so incredibly difficult to use or to get started using.

Return on Investment

For me Spotfire is a huge time saver. I can build the pivot table I need to quickly answer questions here faster and with more confidence than anything else I have seen.
The ability to see data in new and creative visualisations instead of just plain tables, allows for better decisions, and cleaner data (you see the mistakes so much easier).