Spotfire Offers Low-Cost Mining Tool

Medical research isn't often turned to for its economic wisdom, but now a data visualization tool aimed primarily at life-science and pharmaceutical researchers may well point the way toward a form of low-cost data mining for business users.

Spotfire 4, just-released by Cambridge, Mass.-based Spotfire Inc., was designed to provide those low-cost capabilities. It gives users the ability to visualize, analyze and mine large sets of technical and multidimensional data.

Company officials acknowledged that Spotfire doesn't carry the heft or the analytic capabilities of traditional mining tools from the likes of SAS Institute Inc. or Thinking Machines Corp., but its price tag, starting at $5,000 per seat, has attracted many users.

Finding Patterns

"It has solved a lot of headaches at once for us," said Curtis Lockshin, a researcher in the drug discovery division at Sepracor Inc., a Marlboro, Mass.-based pharmaceutical company.

Without Spotfire, Lockshin said, he would have to query for a single answer at a time, then compare results in a spreadsheet graph. That probably wouldn't highlight the patterns and connections that turn up with data visualization tools.

Although focused on the research market now, Spotfire plans to target a larger business audience with forthcoming releases. But one analyst said such a move might not be a simple one.

"They've done the smart thing in customizing their visualizations for particular industries," said Herb Edelstein, an analyst at Two Crows Corp., a Potomac, Md.-based consultancy. "But this may make it difficult initially [for them] to translate that to the general business community."