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Just another review
March 18, 2016

Just another review

Luan Tran | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire Platform

Spotfire is being used in R&D and Internal Audit to visualize data and enable our users to do data analysis.
  • Spptfore allows our users to 'discover' data patterns and to spot trends. We use it to perform financial fraud analytics
  • Spotfire allows our users to easily drill down on data across hierarchies.
  • Spotfire enables us to easily prototype a certain graph and data visualization for presentation.
  • Spotfire enables us to do data profiling when we don't understand the relationships between the data.
  • Product installation and product management is NOT as refined as some other enterprise tools
  • The 'programing interface' (e.g the formula screen, the user function screen) can be improve so that developers can easily program their code without having to strain their eyes to look for errors
  • At least with the version we are using, we need improvement on database connectivity and the entire data model organization. There is no obvious way to update the data model without throwing the entire thing out of the window.
We selected Spotfire for the data visualization capabilities, thus the shortcomings were not as important. However, it would have been nice to be able to consolidate reporting / analytics platforms into one product instead of having BI and Spotfire or Tableau.
SAP Business Objects, Tableau Desktop
Data connectivity from Spotfire is still very primitive when compared to other tools, and it doesn't seem to be well thought out. We use only Oracle DBMS so my experience is limited to Oracle.
1. It would have been nice to be able to pull data directly (native driver) from Oracle for faster performance instead of using the ODBC or JDBC driver.
2. Provide a 'built-in' data staging or caching area in Spotfire so that it doesn't hit the database every time we pull or update or refresh the data. I am not referring to report caching. If you cache the raw data, you can perform many operations without hitting the database.
3. It's a pain to 'update' the data model and change a validated report if we have to change the data source. For example, there's no easy way to look up where a column is used and if we update the column, what report or data elements are going to be affected.

Access control is OK, though Spotfire might think about setting up default roles / out of the box roles based on best practices. For example: if one select the role of Developer, Spotfire should provide a basic template of what developer should normally have access to and then allowing the user to customize (remove or add) more roles as needed.
Spotfire is not suited for 'canned' report and other more rigid visualization. Spotfire is also not very 'programmable' (as opposed to BI or Tableau).

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
3.7
Pixel Perfect reports
2
Customizable dashboards
5
Report Formatting Templates
4
6.8
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
4
4.0
Publish to PDF
6
Report Versioning
2
Report Delivery Scheduling
4
8.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
4.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
3
Role-Based Security Model
4
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using TIBCO Spotfire Platform

30 - R&D and Finance
4 - DBA, BI, Admin
  • Data Visualization
  • Data Exploration
  • Report