Item: Spotfire
Rating: 9
Author: Thomas Plumridge P.Geo

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spotfire is used across the company for a variety of data analytics and corporate KPI tracking. I have leveraged it extensively to help me process large volumes of data and create visualizations which can then be presented to our executive team to inform business decisions. It is also used to track our ongoing activity in our business in a series of dashboards, allowing for us to compare across the organization and be informed about where performance is exceeding or underperforming our expectations.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Functional dashboards which can be understood quickly by those who use them
Great visualizations for disparate data sets
Ease of integration of multiple data sets into one consolidated data table
Linking of standalone data tables with data pulled from an API link through information links

Cons

Easier mapping integration with data, especially with data of different geospatial projections
More functionality in spatial sampling

Return on Investment

Allows for much quicker visualizations used in my presentations to management, especially in being able to thematically map shapefile and database information.
Our internal Spotfire dashboard for activity tracking across Canada has been instrumental in improving the weekly reporting I do.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

I have only briefly used Power BI and I found the interface more familiar as it leverages a lot of familiar aspects that come from Excel. However, I did not find it was a clean an interface for visualizations as Spotfire was.

Key Insights

Do you think Spotfire delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Spotfire's feature set?

Yes

Did Spotfire live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Spotfire go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Spotfire again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Drillinginfo DI Analytics, Prism

Likelihood to Recommend

It is ideal for situations where you are pulling together multiple datasets and integrating them into one visualization. It does fall a bit flat for working with more than two Y-Axis sets on combination tables, where Excel is better at displaying that type of information.

It also should allow users to manually adjust the vertical axis scale as there may be reasoning in modifying it to a smaller or larger range but maintaining the same data step.

It would be ideal to enhance the ability to sort data. For example, there are instances where you want to sort data in a stacked bar chart by something other than count or alphabetically.

Spotfire Training

Training Types Used

in-person training

There was a one day course we took through a TIBCO partner (CADEON), which walked through the basics of TIBCO Spotfire and how to use it. I found this helpful, but not nearly comprehensive enough for my purposes. I have leveraged the online community of users to help me find solutions to most of my roadblocks

Comments

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Software Version