Date Posted:
Product: TIBCO Spotfire®
Product: TIBCO Spotfire®
Problem:
Overview of TIBCO Spotfire Analyst, TIBCO Spotfire Consumer, TIBCO Spotfire Business Author, and TIBCO Spotfire Desktop.
Solution:
This articles attempts to provide an overview of the different Spotfire products and what they enable an end user to do.
TIBCO Spotfire Analyst, formerly called the Spotfire Professional client, empowers professionals to freely analyze data and create analytic dashboards. It enables users to pull in data from several types of in-memory or in-db sources, as well as use R scripting with ease. Dashboards developed using Spotfire Analyst can be published over TIBCO Spotfire Consumer to share with geographically distributed users through a browser-based interactive interface.
TIBCO Spotfire Consumer, formerly called the TIBCO Spotfire Web Player client, presents interactive analytic reports through a browser-based interface for geographically dispersed colleagues, customers, and business partners. It extends the reach of analytics to a broad base of business professionals and decision-makers throughout – and beyond – the enterprise, with interactive Spotfire dashboards. The Web Player JavaScript API integrates solutions with Spotfire Consumer. It enables creation of mashups, which are defined as a combination of two or more web pages. These web pages can combine Spotfire Consumer with your own pages, or with those of other, third-party web applications.
A Spotfire Consumer user launches a session via a web browser, by connecting to the URL for a TIBCO Spotfire Web Player server and logging in.
TIBCO Spotfire Business Author is a powerful browser-based client within TIBCO Spotfire Consumer that allows business users to create and configure common business visualizations, add new data, and save and share analyses and visualizations with others. Business Author fulfills a need for users who need a lightweight web-based interface but need additional authoring ability beyond Spotfire Consumer's interactive-dashboard model.
Web-based authoring of interactive reports and guided analyses may be done only if one has access to the TIBCO Spotfire Business Author license.
TIBCO Spotfire Desktop is a standalone software application for data exploration and Spotfire analysis development on a Windows PC or laptop. It provides a capability to connect using all of Spotfire's direct client-side data connectors (OLAP, DBs, Hadoop, SAP, etc.), and to access R statistics methods using the embedded TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R engine. It is a standalone but trimmed down version of TIBCO Spotfire Analyst, and does not depend on periodic connection to the Spotfire Server to function. Because it does not connect to Spotfire Server, TIBCO Spotfire Desktop users do not have the ability to share and distribute dashboards for use in the web clients (Spotfire Consumer and Spotfire Business Author). For the same reason, TIBCO Spotfire Desktop does not provide server-side data access via Spotfire information links, which are implemented in Spotfire Server. TIBCO Spotfire Desktop also does not provide the ability to extend it for use with custom data sources, visualizations, or tools.