Simple answer:
“Spotfire paid for itself within six months.” – CIO of a large entertainment company.
Complex answer:
As you may know, TIBCO Spotfire® is an analytics platform. What you may not know, is that Spotfire also has a unique analytics product stack offering that no other vendor can match in breadth and depth. Spotfire is a great choice for any size business, but before you buy, you must first consider your own use-case, needs and overall vision around what you want to do with your data.
As an analytics platform, Spotfire offers you a variety of add-on capabilities as the sophistication of your environment grows, or as you climb up the analytics maturity curve, so to speak. For example, say you want to add advanced statistical analytics…with Spotfire you can. Say you want to do advanced street-level mapping…well in Spotfire, you can! And say you want to automate report building and distribution or add event-based analytics…once again, with Spotfire you can! And you can add these capabilities at a pace that suits your growing analytical needs.
So the question is how much do I pay for buying all of the capabilities offered by Spotfire? What does Spotfire cost? Until now, the core pricing of Spotfire was complex with all of the individual components priced separately. However, TIBCO has been working to simplify the pricing and making the platform competitive. Given your needs and your analytics footprint, Spotfire may be the most affordable analytics product on the market, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Spotfire is right for you. Your final decision to buy should not be based purely on cost!
An apples to apples comparison is what you should be doing to see if your current and future needs will be met with the product investment you want to make. Here is a rough comparison of functionality and pricing of other products that you’d need in order to get the equivalent power that’s offered by Spotfire alone:
- Data visualization: Yes, this is the starting point for Spotfire. There are many products in the market that offer this functionality.
- Advanced statistical analytics and embedded R (via TERR): Although fairly deep statistical capabilities come embedded within Spotfire, if you need to run R routines, you can run them inside of Spotfire via TERR, TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R. To add similar statistical capabilities to a different BI/analytics tool, you’ll need to buy Alteryx or SAS. Alteryx pricing starts at $3,995 per user per year and SAS is even more expensive on an annualized basis. Right off the bat, Spotfire will cost you a third or less than the cost of these products.
- Advanced Mapping (via Maporama acquisition): There really is no equivalent product that other vendors offer. In geomapping, ESRI is the Cadillac but costs more like a Ferrari. You get about 60% of the capability of ESRI within Spotfire for free (including layers/latitude and longitude interpretations, etc.).
- Mobile Metrics (via PushBI acquisition): Spotfire Mobile Metrics is the smartphone/tablet solution. It was built from the ground up for alerts/KPI push notifications for smartphones. A similar product is available from Metrics Insights, but with more bells and whistles. Mobile Metrics pricing is not available on the website, so give me a call and I can share some insights!
- Process enablement/automation: TIBCO offers Automation Services, a unique feature that enables you to automate a range of activities such as the creation of reporting/PDFs/emailing, etc. This feature can be crucial if you are looking to expand your deployment and involve a broader end-user base.
To truly identify if Spotfire is the best analytics platform for your BI needs, sign-up for the FREE 30-day Spotfire Trial and send us an email at [email protected] if you have any questions. Syntelli is a TIBCO Spotfire consulting partner and has extensive experience with implementing the software for our clients. We’d be happy to discuss your questions and see if Spotfire is the right platform for your analytical needs.
