Item: Spotfire
Rating: 9
Author: Willy Nunn

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spotfire is currently in the implementation phase across multiple departments including sales, operations (manufacturing), process engineering, human resources, and materials management. Its original install was intended as a process engineering tool to investigate data relationships in process and manufacturing data. However, it's ease of use helped us grab much of the readily available business data to help find the hidden "details behind the data". We have found that its biggest value is collaborative use in a meeting environment where multiple individuals can work and drive actions from the data interaction abilities Spotfire provides.

Pros and Cons

Spotfire's interactive visualizations with drill-down capability make it extremely easy to gain insight from large data sets, and deliver that same ability to business users within minimal hand holding.
The ability of Spotfire to "mashup" data from disparate data sources creates agile analytics that can provide real business insight in a manufacturing environment (e.g. process data combined with quality data).
The strong capability of the web based platform relative to the traditional desktop platform makes it incredibly easy to disseminate analytics across multiple user groups.
Default visualizations and colors are visually appealing and allow for quick diving into the data rather than spending significant time fiddling with the setup to get the data to "look right".

The help files for building custom expressions within analytics files should be significantly updated to provide better usage examples. Frequently analysts have to look externally to find answers as to how to properly parse a custom expression.
Errors require more feedback to direct the user as to how to correct the root cause of the error.
Visualization builder should be context sensitive to prevent selections of incompatible data, or impossible axes, etc.

Data Integration

Spotfire has a growing portfolio of native support for varying data sources. On a business user level, importing data from different file type data sources is simple and straightforward. Building information links from SQL sources etc., requires a stronger bit of IT support to get full value, but once implemented, provides significant ease of use for the business. Real time data is not yet readily available and requires workarounds to implement.

Collaboration and Sharing

Spotfire provides multiple ways to share data across multiple user groups. It's simple to publish any analytics file to the library to allow other users to interact with the data. Multiple platforms (web application, mobile applications, and desktop) all provide similar amounts of capability to interact with the data. Bookmarking allows sharing of individual views with filters, marking, and formatting.

Likelihood to Recommend

Spotfire is well suited to gain quick business value in an area where there is not a significant quantity of centralized data. Easy drag and drop importing of Excel data makes for rapid deployment in a work environment where the business is just starting to grow, and the importance of self-serve analytics is critical. This is especially true in an environment with a very lean IT work force where much of the data discovery needs to be done by the business users themselves.

Spotfire keeps up the heat on readily accessible analytics for business users.

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Data Integration

Collaboration and Sharing

Likelihood to Recommend

Spotfire Feature Ratings