April 2019
“Who are JMP’s competitors? (maybe we have them in narrow areas)—but there is nothing else like it.
Who is as interactive?
Who else does as great a job at DOE?
Who does analysis faster and bigger on the desktop?
Who else does Graph Builder as well?
No one, because JMP is truly unique in the crowded marketplace.” -John Sall
Note: This is a first pass at a SWOT for Tibco Spotfire for publishing and collaboration; formerly, they marketed Web Player as a component for publishing, however, with “Spotfire X,” they no longer mention it in their product bundles. We need to partner with the sales teams to provide feedback on this SWOT as conversations about JMP Live take place. Thanks in advance for the feedback.
Company
- TIBCO Software Inc. provides integration, analytics and event-processing software for companies to use on-premises or as part of cloud computing environments. The software manages information, decisions, processes and applications for over 10,000 customers. Spotfire was founded in 1996. TIBCO purchased Spotfire in 2007. In 2014, Tibco Spotfire agreed to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners, in large part to better rationalize and capitalize on their product portfolio.
- Data access and connectivity is extensive and includes IoT devices with their streaming capability.
- Tibco has a network of resellers, system integrators, OEM and solution/technology partners.
Products
- Tibco Cloud Spotfire allows analytics as a service without IT infrastructure and maintenance.
- Tibco Spotfire Platform is the on-site offering to provide greater control of performance, security, etc.
- Tibco Cloud Spotfire Enterprise allows analytics as a private, hosted service.
- Spotfire for Amazon Web Services provides Spotfire as a turnkey AWS instance.
- For purposes of pricing Tibco Cloud Spotfire, they charge by Spotfire Clients—Analyst, Business Author, Consumer—and for Library Storage (see pricing info below and at https://www.tibco.com/products/tibco-spotfire/editions-pricing#pricing).
- In support of collaboration, results can be shared with one-click web publishing in dashboards. “Threaded discussions, annotations, and filtered analytics views show exact context for the insights. The Spotfire library stores analysis files, statistical scripts, and information links, to maximize productivity among users.”
- For sharing and collaboration, they provide bookmarks, conversations, annotations, exporting to a variety of file formats as well as custom export, and Library management.
- They have extensive administration capabilities including built-in user and group management and multiple means of authenticating users
Target Audience
- Users who need to share graphs and results as well as IT.
Feature Strength and JMP Response
- There are many reviews (hundreds and hundreds mostly positive and very recent) for Tibco Spotfire products on TrustRadius.
- Attractive interface. JMP Live also has an attractive interface.
- Simple security integration and configuration with in-house information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and systems. JMP Live will offer some centrally managed security rules in the initial release.
Feature Weaknesses and JMP Response
- Not all graph types are supported (3D scatter plots and network graphs among them). For a first release, the graphs supported by JMP Live are quite extensive—3D scatter plots can be published, though they are not yet interactive.
- Documentation is criticized on TrustRadius as being inadequate (even confusing) compared to JMP, Python, or Matlab.
- Criticized for not very comprehensive user access rights.
- Reviews on TrustRadius indicate that printing can be an issue, especially with a dark-themed analysis.
Opportunities for JMP
- Given JMP’s 30 years of enhancements, we have a lot to offer for visual discovery and analysis. The need to share analysis results and to collaborate on analysis may be well served by using JMP Live.
- If Spotfire is already in use, we may gain entry where more specialized analysis methods need to be shared—DOE, reliability, etc.
Threats for JMP
- Special chemical structure support makes some users very loyal to Spotfire and potentially sharing related graphical results via Web Player versus JMP Live. If there are other JMP users doing other analyses which need to be shared, JMP Live could still be considered.
Pricing
Competitive references where we’ve won against them or displaced them.
