David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about TIBCO Spotfire drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

We published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Data 2021, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on analytics and business intelligence focusing on mobile, embedded and collaborative capabilities. Because each is a critical aspect of modern BI, we developed specific criteria to provide an in-depth look at features geared specifically to mobile, embedded and collaborative use.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated TIBCO Spotfire and 17 other vendors in seven categories: five relevant to the product and experience – Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability – and two related to the customer experience – Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Analytics and Business Intelligence. TIBCO had an overall performance rating of 58.2% in the Value Index, a 51.9% rating for customer experience and a 59.4% rating for product experience.

TIBCO is a large independent vendor of BI and data-related software. TIBCO recently acquired Information Builders. This evaluation was completed before the acquisition was complete and considers only Tibco’s offering. Information Builders is evaluated separately.

Tibco was categorized as a Vendor with Merit, ranking 15th overall in this Value Index evaluation. Tibco performed its best in Reliability and Adaptability.

Tibco Spotfire is available as an on-premises or cloud-based offering. Data can be loaded into Spotfire for in-memory analysis or it can be accessed in-database. Tibco has acquired a variety of analytics and data vendors with capabilities including artificial intelligence, machine learning and streaming analytics, all of which the company has been integrating with Spotfire. While best known for its interactive visualizations, Spotfire’s recent additions include data preparation and real-time analyses.

Better data modeling and data access, along with collaboration, deeper predictive analytics and communication of analyses results would help improve Tibco’s Capability rating. Support for a wider variety of roles and natural language processing would help improve Usability. Tibco would perform better in Adaptability with better business process and application integration. More information about the business case, including helping prospects project costs and benefits, would help improve TCO/ROI.

Facilitating communication and collaboration among those involved in the decision-making process leads to more informed and better decisions. Our research shows that nearly four in 10 organizations are using collaboration to support analytics processes, and more than one-half said they expect to use these capabilities in the future. TIBCO Spotfire supports sharing analyses and emailing bookmarks or URLs of analyses; publishing analyses directly to presentations and briefing books integration with tibbr, TIBCO’s collaboration platform; and posting URLs to third-party collaboration tools. TIBCO would improve its Capability ranking with support for alerts and notifications, social recognition, assigning and tracking tasks, and more types of displays to share for communicating strategy and vision.

Analytics embedded within applications can dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for data preparation which, our research shows, can be the most time-consuming step in the analytical process. The Spotfire platform includes developer capabilities for building extensions to products using C#, Java, JavaScript and web services. Data science analyses using Python, KNIME and Statistica can be integrated, and the platform also includes a co-branding kit. Better data model management and manipulation, more NLP and more built-in visualizations would help improve its Capability score.

Mobile access to analytics is important to workers expecting to conduct business in any location at any time. Nearly two-thirds of organizations (65%) provide support for both smartphones and tablets. Spotfire Analytics is available as native applications for iOS and Android devices. The product provides good navigation and interaction on mobile devices including annotations and guided analytics. It also supports integration with device features such as the camera and location awareness. A broader range of visualizations along with better collaboration, offline mode and support for wearables would help improve its Capability score.

This assessment was based on TIBCO’s analytics products available in December of 2020. Since then, TIBCO has issued several new Spotfire releases. The geospatial capabilities now include updated geographical data with more detail and the ability to connect to GeoJSON files. Real time data is supported with connectivity to TIBCO Cloud Data Streams. Additional data sources include Brytlyt, MariaDB cloud instances and SingleStore. Data preparation has been enhanced with the ability to see hidden intermediate data tables and automatic column matching when rows are added (for instance, unions). TIBCO’s framework for extensions, Spotfire Mods, has several enhancements, including additional governance mechanisms. There are also a number of administration and usability enhancements. The list of new features in recent releases is available here.

Organizations should evaluate data and analytics requirements including collaborative, embedded and mobile capabilities to ensure existing solutions are meeting the organization’s needs. If existing solutions are not satisfying those requirements, organizations should consider whether TIBCO can help meet those needs.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and BI software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here, and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.

Regards,

David Menninger