BI Software - Spotfire

Spotfire - Business Intelligence Solutions

Spotfire has built a solid business as a guided, analytical application platform vendor. The technical strength of the platform comes from a combination of interactive visualization, in-memory-based analysis, and a wizard-based development environment built for analysts, not IT programmers. Spotfire has also been able to demonstrate knowledge of vertical domains like pharmaceuticals, energy and semiconductors to better understand the context of analyzing business problems. Its original DecisionSite product was primarily focused on the analysis of scientific data, but, with the release of DXP last year, Spotfire is branching into horizontal domains to analyze typical business subject areas such as sales, marketing and financial data.

This strategy has initially proven successful, as Spotfire has been able to sell large deals to multiple departments. Spotfire is positioned in the Niche Players quadrant because it does well in the analysis segment of the BI platform market. But it is rarely used for other BI platform capabilities such as reporting, dashboards, scorecards and BI metadata. Also, Spotfire's sales channel is much smaller than those of vendors in other quadrants. Its direct sales force is a reasonable size, but it has few partnerships with systems integrators, VARS and other channel partners.

Finally, Spotfire must find a way to sustain its technical differentiation, as other BI platform vendors improve their own interactive visualization and in-memory capabilities.

Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/145507.html