TIBCO, Spotfire, and S+

December 9, 2008 by admin.

A month or so ago I received an email from TIBCO referencing a license I had for Spotfire S+. TIBCO recently acquired Insightful Software and its flagship statistical analysis product S-PLUS. I had written a review of SPLUS 8 for DM Review about a year and half ago http://www.dmreview.com/specialreports/20070605/1084643-1.html, and Insightful had issued me a license to support the evaluation. I liked the product a lot, but thought its positioning against open source R was tenuous at best. Both S-PLUS and R had descended from the same S code base developed at Bell Labs in the 80’s and 90’s, with S-PLUS going the commercial proprietary route, while R went open source academia. R’s success has been nothing short of extraordinary, while S-PLUS struggled. The sale of Insightful to TIBCO was a concession that the R competition was probably too tough.

In addition to providing info on newly-acquired S+, TIBCO’s email offered me the opportunity to test-run the latest release of its award-winning Spotfire visualization platform, software it had acquired in 2007. It’d been at least four years since I’d looked at Spotfire, so I decided to try the 30-day trial, filling up the slow moments of the Thanksgiving holiday.

I was even more enthused with Spotfire in 2008 than I’d been years ago. I just seemed to click with the product. The install was effortless, the demos enabling, the help timely. I was able to load data effortlessly from both csv files and a MySQL database. I had no trouble putting my 25,000 row data set to the test, showcasing just about all the statistical plots – including my favorite trellis variations, creating new variables, deploying the visuals to the web, etc. I was even able to get a 650,000 row randomly-generated data set to load and perform reasonably. I was very impressed, a happy camper.

And then I went back to the TIBCO WebStore to check on cost. I saw right away that pricing was positioned as subscription for the combo of Spotfire Professional, Spotfire Metrics and Web-based training, of which I was only interested in Professional. The first number I processed, though, was $399 – which seemed quite reasonable. That is, until I realized that was for a month; the annual cost was $4788! I was stupefied. How could an annual subscription for essentially a desktop product be priced so outrageously? Is TIBCO not aware of viable open source alternatives?

Next time I’ll chat about a new OS statistical visualization tool, Mondrian (http://stats.math.uni-augsburg.de/Mondrian/Mondrian.html), that I feel has a chance to be quite disruptive in this space.

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