Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Spotfire, Inc.
Somerville, MA

Spotfire DecisionsSite
> Decision Support for Technical Professionals

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

In the race for product leadership, innovative companies are employing more knowledge workers and collecting more information than ever before. Spotfire’s customers are intent on improving and accelerating the decision making that drives the returns on investments in product development. Two pharmaceutical companies and a high-tech manufacturer were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Providing technical staff with a common decision-making platform

§ Streamlining the decision-making process and pipeline

§ Identifying analytical best practices

WHY SPOTFIRE?

Spotfire addresses the needs of data-intensive decision-making product lifecycle processes in R&D, manufacturing, product discovery, distribution, and marketing settings. Spotfire DecisionSite provides a highly configurable application for creating product process analytics using interactive visual analysis. With DecisionSite as a framework, organizations are able to build a library of analytic techniques and systematize routine analysis and related communication. Using Spotfire’s XML architecture, organizations are able to give end users easier access to large data sets, simplify the query-building process, and achieve more consistent results.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Increasing the reliability of complex analytic processes creates significant returns for knowledge-dependent companies. Reference customers have improved the timeliness of product lifecycle decisions and reduced the potential for errors. In improving the quality of technical decision analysis, they have also cut product-related costs. One business has cut thousands of dollars from the cost of performing a single analytic task.

Enterprise innovation: Spotfire helps businesses identify problems and opportunities sooner and faster. By adopting a common analytic platform, Spotfire’s customers are widening the applicability of sophisticated analyses. In one case, the efficiency gains from Spotfire have been so significant that its use has spread from one functional area to dozens of teams within the company.

Technology gains: Manufacturing, engineering, and R&D analytic applications have traditionally lacked the relative uniformity of financial and marketing decision tools and applications. Spotfire enables companies to place an umbrella framework over a diverse set of data types and extraction methods. Spotfire’s pre-built task-oriented libraries make it easier to widen the audience for sophisticated analyses. Companies can shorten the time to benefit with solutions for manufacturing process analysis, lead discovery, functional genomics, and GIS map interaction.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Companies should set reasonable goals for a Spotfire pilot. Often, the state of the internal data environment requires some remediation. Companies should assess their situation in order to maximize the benefits achievable from an initial project.

Learning: End users find Spotfire’s visual interface intuitive.

Resources: As companies develop their own libraries of common analytic tasks, they should staff project teams with personnel trained in statistics and visualization. IT teams should also be involved in assessing desktop memory requirements, especially data-intensive display applications such as visual manipulation of mapping data. Hardware requirements are reasonable given the nature of the analysis, but increasing the proportion of decision makers with access to strong analytic techniques will increase the percentage of desktops requiring more generous memory.

Fit: Companies dependent on data-intensive analytical processes for competitive product advantage and continued success should consider Spotfire’s potential to enhance the strategy.

COMPANY INFO

Spotfire, Inc., is a private company with 180 employees.

617.702.1600
www.spotfire.com
Published: January 2002