Tibco Spotfire X (10.4)
September 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
Company
- Spotfire was founded in 1996. TIBCO purchased Spotfire in 2007. TIBCO historically focused on service oriented architecture, business process management, and business optimization. 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.
- Through acquisitions and OEMs, Tibco has added data science/machine learning, streaming analytics, geoanalytics, data cataloging and data virtualization.
- Capabilities from recently-acquired Statistica are now fully integrated with Spotfire.
Product
- Spotfire was originally focused on analytic applications for the life sciences and oil and gas industries. Since Tibco acquired Statistica, they position Spotfire as AI-driven, scalable analytics with built-in data wrangling, visual, predictive, and location-intelligence capabilities to explore data, create dashboards, or develop analytic applications. They tout Spotfire as easy to learn and customize. The analytical family of Spotfire products is positioned in their Augment Intelligence umbrella, with Data Visualization, Advanced Analytics and Data Management categories. Other offerings are under the Interconnect Everything umbrella.
Data Visualization products include
- Tibco Spotfire
- Tibco Jaspersoft
Advanced Analytics products include
- Tibco Data Science
- Tibco Streaming
Data Management products include
- Tibco EBX Software
- Tibco Data Virtualization
- Tibco Graph Database
- Spotfire X (10.4) was released June 2019. It is available for Windows and unix.
- The major enhancements for 10.0 (released Nov. 2018)
- Build visualizations from typing in Search, e.g., “Sales per region and year”
- A completely redone user interface, with “one places” for visualizations, for connecting to data, for viewing data workflow.
- Search and mark values in data from the search bar
- AI-powered recommendations, e.g., if a column is selected, the software will show recommended visualizations including other columns that may be related.
- New scheduling services.
- New connector list and support for Apache Drill.
- Recommendation engine support for links between tables, and many other enhancements.
- New capabilities in 10.x releases: https://www.tibco.com/products/tibco-spotfire/whats-new.
Target Audience
- Primarily businesses, focusing on analysts across all areas of an organization. In addition, they target developers who want to take advantage of algorithms in open source and via their Flogo project, an open source framework to build microservices/functions that can run on serverless cloud, IoT, or edge computing.
Feature Strength and JMP Response
- Visual exploration: Spotfire supports a number of advanced visualizations including heat maps, small multiples, network charts, and now waterfall charts. They are highly interactive with details on demand, sliders and checkboxes to filter results, and the ability to select portions of a chart with those data elements highlighted in a related chart. JMP arguably has better-looking screenshots versus what is on Tibco’s web pages and we have made more enhancements in areas like packed bars, interactive HTML, and other Graph Builder enhancements.
- Data source connectivity and In-database: Tibco Spotfire Data Connectors maximize the use of native data source capabilities Much like SAS Access products and in-database offerings, these still require some set-up. JMP is still reliant on ODBC to access RDBMSs, but Query Builder makes accessing the data much easier and has very efficient performance. Users simply need to have read access to the data sources.
- Predictive analytics: Similar to JMP, no programming is required to do predictive modeling, classification and other analyses, though users have the option to code in R and S+. JMP provides predictive modeling and classification capabilities and more (like award-winning DOE) all in one, organically grown product in addition to providing options to code in JSL, R and Matlab.
- Location Analytics: Tibco supports Esri, ArcGIS and other location data. They already had location analytics with Spotfire GeoAnalytics and have built on that. JMP has similar capabilities.
- IoT: Tibco has a stronger IoT message with their edge machine learning on device to build event-driven apps, all opensource, including a zero-coding environment for those who prefer it. JMP can leverage SAS for some similar capabilities.
Feature Weaknesses and JMP Response
- Visualization: Spotfire provides a highly visual and interactive way to explore data yet Spotfire’s distribution still cannot highlight portions of the graph for data selected by the user (e.g., an entire distribution bar will be highlighted when only a portion of the bar is selected.). JMP correctly highlights only the portion of the bar whose data has been selected, an essential component of a distribution graph and not having it renders the visual useless.
- Limited text analytics: In June 2017, Tibco partnered with Attivio to gain some artificial intelligence-based approach to do some sense making of unstructured data according to Attivio’s press release. Tibco has incorporated some search analytics into Spotfire, but they don’t claim to do text analytics. If users want to use Spotfire for text analytics, it is suggested they use Attivio’s Integrated Development Environment. JMP’s implementation of text analytics takes a statistical approach and makes it very easy to use.
- License costs and migration issues: According to the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, cost prevented spreading Spotfire to a wider user base by an above-average percentage of TIBCO’s reference customers (23%). Further, reference customers gave below-average marks on their migration experience. TIBCO was also ranked low for service, support and the quality of their technical support, however reference customers rated these aspects more positively.
- Product positioning: All-purpose analytics, which pits it against many bigger players, SAS included. JMP has a much more targeted, and therefore pertinent solution to its audience.
Opportunities for JMP
- JMP is a more fully integrated solution that brings data visualization and analysis to a wide group of “specific-use” customers (i.e. DOE, Reliability, Consumer Research, etc.) with more functionality in just one product, including text analytics, functional data analysis, etc.
- Our tighter integration with SAS.
- Even Gartner points out concerns about market momentum in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms: “Major investments by TIBCO in social media marketing, strategic partnerships and thought leadership programs over the past year have yet to materially improve its market momentum.” JMP has had solid growth and is part of SAS, also with solid growth over decades.
- Now that JMP Live is available, we can better compete on sharing dashboards and results. See also SWOT for Tibco Spotfire for publishing and collaboration.
- JMP provides superior customer support, which can be an important differentiator.
Threats for JMP
- Ease-of-use for complex kinds of analysis (though many customer reviews say Spotfire has a steep learning curve).
- Addresses more of the analytic life cycle than JMP does.
- More mature messaging for IT than JMP currently has.
- The professional services group offers a range of analytic consulting services including “analytics strategy, technical architecture and product deployment, complex analytics development projects and support for the Spotfire Center of Analytics Excellence. The PSG team also provides maintenance activities, such as the Health Check Assessment offering and managed services, to ensure that customers can fully utilize the power of the TIBCO family of analytics products.” JMP has mentoring services via SAS Education; JMP has a growing network of partners and some SAS consultants also know JMP.
Pricing
Tibco Cloud Spotfire is $125/month for 1 Analyst and 1 Business Author seat. Additional Business Author seats are $64 / month. Consumer seats can be added for $25 / month. Library Storage is $25 / month for 250 GB.
Tibco Spotfire Platform and Tibco Cloud Enterprise have no published pricing. Spotfire for Amazon Web Services starts at $0.99/hour.
Competitive references where we’ve won against them or displaced them.
Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp?
