Item: Spotfire
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had problem with sharing data between the management team. Usually financial statements were sent monthly via email and that was it. We decided to use Spotfire's platform to streamline the data sharing, and see more metrics that were getting lost in our systems. We basically design various visualizations in Spotfire, and run reports in our systems, save it to a shared location, and Spotfire does the rest when updating the data. Users consume the data via the Spotfire Cloud.

Pros and Cons

Visualizations are very nice looking and sleek.
A lot of different kinds of ways to import data.
Very nice web interface to create visualizations on the go.

Limited functionality on the "graphical table" visualization.
Hard to rename columns. It often shows the name of the column that comes on the report (Ex: Avg (Planned Hours))
When data is updated, sometimes it loses the formatting.

Data Integration

We don't use this functionality at this moment. We only run reports to Excel, and save them on the right path, and update the data on the Spotfire visualization.

Collaboration and Sharing

We use this a lot. Different users consume the data via the web browser. We have different level access for managers, and project managers to see different visualizations that affect their business units. The ability to have named users is great to manage the access. Also, having different creators is useful for us.

Alternatives Considered

We didn't really evaluate other alternatives. Spotfire met our expectations after the demo session.

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, Vorex PSA, Microsoft Project

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited when displaying trending data, and comparing values. You can also build very complex formulas to accomplish difficult calculations. It is not well suited to display single values, or form type of visuals. If you need to display a single value, it must be on every single row of your data set, and then take the average of that column.

Very robust visualization system!

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire