Spotfire Flashcards
Spotfire’s Position
Spotfire is newly positioned at the business user but its core is in science and research. Tableau has always been positioned toward the business user, but we can do science too. Most of Spotfire’s “science” positioning is just that- positioning.
Spotfire Customer Focus
A lot of customers use stats packages like R or Splus in addition to Spotfire
Spotfire does have a lot of reference customers in science
They focus on the IT department. Most of our deals do not involve the IT department
Since being acquired by Tibco, Spotfire has released very little in the way of new features. They’ve had high-level defections and are showing little vision. Ask customers: what is the future of this product? Tibco doesn’t seem to care much about it.
Spotfire Strength: Complexity of Analysis
Tibco Software (Spotfire)’s complexity of user analysis score is higher than any vendor on the Magic Quadrant, while at the same time, customers rate it one of the easiest platforms to use of all vendors. This paradox typifies why data discovery tools in general, and Tibco Spotfire in particular, are so compelling and proliferating.
Spotfire Strength: Product Vision
Tibco Spotfire’s strong product vision is a key strength. Its focus on advanced and real-time analytic applications and dashboards delivered to mobile devices contributes to its strong vision. Unlike the other data discovery platforms (for example, QlikView and Tableau), Tibco Spotfire is leveraging its acquisition of Insightful for data mining as well as its integration with Tibco middleware to broaden the possible spectrum of end-user-driven interactive analysis to incorporate business events, predictive analytics, statistical analysis and “what if” modeling. Over the past year, Tibco Spotfire has introduced capabilities to deliver its data discovery experience to mobile devices as well as a low-cost SaaS version of its software to allow business users to author and share Tibco Spotfire visualizations and dashboards without having to install the software on-premises.
Spotfire Strength: Flexible and Easy to Use
Tibco Spotfire is a flexible and easy-to-use data discovery platform based on a unique in-memory architecture and authoring environment for building and using highly interactive analytic applications and dashboards. Like QlikView and Tableau, Tibco Spotfire’s interactive visualization approach has become a more widely accepted, and even a preferred, end-user paradigm, and represents a compelling alternative to traditional BI platforms. This architecture has been particularly attractive for delivering on requirements where Tibco Spotfire fills a need not addressed by enterprise BI vendors. Customers choose Tibco Spotfire for its ease of use and functionality more often than they do most other vendors, even though it is less likely to be their enterprise standard.
Spotfire Strength: Customer Service
Much like the other data discovery vendors, that are addressing increasing market requirements for intuitive, highly interactive and lightweight BI platforms, Tibco customers are very satisfied with all aspects of the relationship. In fact, they rate it among the highest in the customer survey for support, customer experience, performance, positive view of vendor’s future, vendor success, overall product functionality, sales experience and achievement of business benefits.
Spotfire Strength: Data Lineage
Tibco Spotfire is a self-contained, well-integrated BI platform, which offers data lineage capabilities typically provided only by more enterprise-ready BI platforms. The user interface displays information about the origin of the data table, together with any transformations or other modifications that have been applied to the original source data. The developer user interface shows lineage all the way down to the source data table. Tibco customers rate Spotfire above average across the five platform integration categories. In fact, Tibco Spotfire earned the highest overall scores in Gartner’s “Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence Platform Integration” report.
Spotfire Strength: Increasing Market Share
Tibco Spotfire is well positioned to take advantage of the increase in market demand for packaged analytic applications and dashboards. A third of Tibco Spotfire’s customers use one or more of its specific packaged applications for life sciences, manufacturing, financial services, network analytics, operational analytics, process analytics, spend analytics, and sales and marketing analysis.
Spotfire Weakness: Small Deployments (Not Scalable)
Even though the average employee size of a company that uses Tibco Spotfire software is the highest in the survey, its deployments tend to be confined to a department or multiple departments, with below average data volumes and numbers of end users when compared with those of other vendors. However, in looking at the survey details, Tibco has some customer references with extremely large datasets and thousands of users that belie its departmental reputation. Tibco Spotfire also scored among the lowest of all vendors in the reference survey on the percent of customers that consider it their BI platform standard. The combination of this result with Tibco Spotfire’s strong functionality ratings suggests that while it is not usually the enterprise standard, it has been successful in augmenting the BI standard when more flexible discovery-based and sophisticated analysis is required.
Spotfire Weakness: High License Cost
Tibco Spotfire is well suited to building analytic content ranging from basic interactive visualizations and dashboards to sophisticated, interactive analytic applications, and its customers are very satisfied, but the perception of Tibco Spotfire’s license cost and packaging has limited it for consideration beyond a restricted set of users with high-end requirements. Tibco Spotfire must overcome its high license cost reputation to capitalize on the significant buying momentum driving the growth of more mainstream and competitively priced and packaged data discovery alternatives. It will need to demonstrate larger and more pervasive deployments and market awareness outside of its traditional high-end niche to be considered a Leader in future. As further evidence of its high license cost reputation, “cost of software” is cited as a limitation to broader deployment more often for Tibco than for any other vendor in the survey except for Actuate and MicroStrategy, and its “total license cost per user” was above the survey average. Tibco’s above average pricing may, in part, be explained by the fact that 35% of its sales are from its analytic applications, which tend to be more expensive. Tibco’s introduction of new pricing and packaging options in 2010, as well as the launch of a low-cost SaaS offering in mid-2010, are evidence of the company’s efforts to combat this market perception.
Spotfire Weakness: Reporting
While Tibco Spotfire is rated among the highest in the survey for ad hoc analysis, interactive visualization and predictive analytics, it is rated in the bottom third of vendors for static and parameterized reporting, confirming that its true sweet spot is in providing a flexible, easy-to-use environment for advanced analysis.
