TIBCO Data Science Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we supply to our clients.

This solution is primarily used for reporting. People want to see the data in their database visualized.

The most valuable feature is the performance.

The scripting for customization could be improved.

I have been working with TIBCO Spotfire for five years.

This is a stable solution.

The platform can be expanded but it is not easy. While doable, it is somewhat complicated to scale. The number of users differs depending on the client, but some of my clients have approximately 1,000 users. It really depends on the size of the organization.

I have been in touch with technical support and I am satisfied with my experience.

The two similar solutions that I have used are MicroStrategy and Tableau.

Tableau is pretty similar and it would be difficult for me to point out the differences.

With MicroStrategy, it has a great feature where you build the representation in the database and it then the tool creates SQL queries by itself. There are more differences between these tools but this is the one essential difference.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Our clients sometimes perform the deployment themselves with the help of documentation. I personally know of some who have done this.

In general, I would say that this is a good tool and I recommend it. I really don't see any pressing features that need to be implemented.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the ease of setting up visualizations.

The interface should be more user-friendly, especially for filtering. With other applications, it is easier to see what you have filtered when you do the analysis. With Spotfire, it is difficult to see what you have filtered when you jump from one page to the other.

It should be easier to connect different databases together. With Spotfire, I need to have a technician assist me, whereas, with other solutions, I was able to do it myself.

I would like the visualization for the map of countries to be more easily configurable.

My company has been using Spotfire for quite a long time but I am just starting to learn it. I began working with it about a month ago.

I know that it has been slow in the past when it was refreshing data from a database, but with what I have been using with an Excel sheet, it has been fast.

I have not experimented with scalability.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

I have used other similar tools in the past.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I am currently evaluating other tools in parallel and there are some that I would recommend before doing so with this solution.

At this point, there are other tools that I would recommend before using Spotfire. However, I am still evaluating it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to take the data for a week or month and develop reports for data support on the dashboard. Some dashboards go through leadership review. We also have developed certain predictive models so that data or the output can be displayed on Spotfire. 

We like the way we can drill down into each report to get back data on each project. From the portfolio level, I can see what is happening on it. That is a really important feature. I can look at indirect costs, for example, which are hitting each CIO portfolio. It's good to be able to see actual resources in terms of time as well as cost. 

It would be ideal if it could be put onto the NMP where you can make more of an analysis. Right now, people don't have enough time to go through the report and make an analysis. It should provide the information of what is on the report into some kind of a dialogue form. Then, a person can ask certain questions and it could interactively give the required report. 

In terms of performance, I can see there are some issues when you are working with big data. When we are taking it from the Data Lake, we have a lot of issues.

If you are doing certain operations of RDBMS, you suffer in terms of the latency of the data. That can be improved upon.

Users should be able to cross tables of the web pages they are developing on Spotfire and this needs to be really easy and convenient. Right now, you need to do a lot of tweaks.

The solution should be more user-friendly and require fewer tweaks, extensions, and workarounds.

I've been using the solution for two to three years.

The stability of the solution is okay but it is not great when you compare to Tableau. 

The scalability is okay, but it's not as good as Tableau. One of our customers does plan to increase usage in the future. However, they may choose to increase usage on Tableau as it's easier to use and they would be more comfortable using it.

Technical support for the solution is good, but the community support offered is not as good as Tableau. I've noticed that on Spotfire, many issues are old but they are not being closed. Whereas, on Tableau, many people are available to provide solutions when you face problems.

The initial setup was straightforward, but when we wanted to achieve certain use cases, it started becoming complex.

For example, we tried the PPM data, which was connected to Spotfire and we were supposed to have some feature columns or engineer columns. If I needed to put it on, I needed to create a calculated column for that. When we were working on the calculated column, the metrics wanted some more data to be taken from other tables. I needed to join two tables and calculate the calculated column.

When we started connecting the calculated column necessary, the source of all that the column was was not properly coming.

When we put it into reports, it was really slow. Whenever the client or someone was opening the report it would take around 15 to 20 minutes to open the first time. That was a problem. We needed to go for caching at the server level, and that's where we were able to improve the performance by 10 minutes. For cross tables, we had to identify some scripting so that certain columns could be displayed properly. 

Deployment ended up taking about 15 days.

We had our own engineers that implemented the solution.

This solution is less expensive than Tableau, which is quite pricey.

Currently, we are using the on-premises deployment model, but we are shifting to the cloud. We're TIBCO partners.

Users considering the solution should be aware that if they get into Spotfire, it is easy to get in but if they wanted to do some advanced things, they need to have good community support or they need to have an expert on their team. There is a lot of tweaking needed in the solution. Help is also not direct so new users will need to do lots of research on Google. Somebody who is proactive enough to do that will succeed when using the solution. If they are not proactive and they expect a really easy solution, I'd suggest like Tableau or Power BI. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. I'd rate it higher if they provided better quality information about their product. Right now, a lot of the information available online is out of date or is the wrong information. In comparison, Tableau has professional how-to videos and documentation that make working with the solution easier.

I am the Executive Manager in the CEO's office and we partner with TIBCO. We deal with Spotfire, and also with TIBCO Business Works. Within Africa, we have the largest consulting group that focuses on TIBCO tools. We use the solution at the First National Bank, where they need it in conjunction with one of the other TIBCO tools that deal with data analytics. We incorporated it for live data to deal with fraudulent activities occurring within the bank. There is a niche team that focuses on the project, probably around 20 people. They get the job done. The team includes IT managers and admin staff. They focus on the back aspect. There are also integrators who liaise with DBA, ensuring the entire system is connected gently. Finally, there are the business users, they're after the reports. If they require something extra then the team provides that for them. 

What is most valuable is the fact that you're able to set things like email groups. The idea that you don't have to generate reports each day but they are sent automatically is great. In our case, we set it on a daily basis. Each morning an email goes out to relevant parties informing them of reports that have been generated and would be of interest to them. 

I would have to say the installation process could be improved. In Spotfire, for example, there are parts that you have to install in terms of getting the data from the database, then there's the Spotfire web aspect to it and the Spotfire desktop portion. It requires three different applications in order to achieve what you need. A single installation file would be a big improvement.

For additional features, I would like more templates. The templates we get are more focused on specific fields but they don't include, for example, a template for the mining sector. Additional templates would help to get things moving more quickly in terms of getting the report out.

I've been using the product since 2010. 

It's quite a stable product. The bugs we found were not necessarily to do with TIBCO Spotfire itself. The DBA can change the credentials, or location of the database, and then we're  unable to generate the report. But this is something they should have communicated with us internally.

It is definitely easy to scale. Even when moving between the different versions, you have the ability to export your previous setup of reports and import it to the new version. And if you want to set up on different nodes, it's actually quite easy.

The technical support is fine. Initially, we try to solve an issue ourselves, if we can't we will go to the TIBCO support site, and log a ticket. Most of the time they will send us a link to a solution that has been provided before to others. If that's not the case then we will have a WebEx where they remotely connect to our systems, and assist in solving the issue. The only snag for us is the time difference, because the support people are normally overseas. We are in South Africa, they are in the US, so it requires coordination and one of us will have to stay after hours in order for the issue to be solved.

We previously used IBM Cognos.

The initial setup was quite complex. I did it by myself. Between 2010 and 2012 I was working for TIBCO South Africa and those are the tools that we were using. Then I moved to other companies but still continued the implementation process.

It's a very user-friendly solution, generating the report is also quite easy, which wasn't the case when we used Cognos and weren't able to get the information we needed. We found that TIBCO Spotfire was actually the better tool for our needs. In this sector of the market, it is indeed a better tool than the other data analytics tool, such as QlikView, for example.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. There's still some room for improvement.