The 2025 Spotfire Energy Forum: Visual Data Science and Energy
Spotfire is Focused on Energy
There are a lot of good tools out there for visualizing and analyzing data. One platform, however, has invested heavily in addressing the unique needs common in oil and gas workflows. Spotfire is doubling down on serving the energy industry, as was made clear at the 2025 Spotfire Energy forum earlier this year (check out the recordings here).
With new oil-and-gas-specific graphics becoming natively available (here’s the presentation covering new features), Spotfire now supports things like well log viewers, wine-rack diagrams, or a 3D surface and line chart that’s perfect for comparing well paths with modeled surfaces. In addition, Spotfire has been working hard to define a unique niche in this space, framing their offering as “Visual Data Science”, as opposed to traditional BI or reporting tools (here’s how their Chief Analytics Officer describes it).
Visual Data Science Can Do a Lot
Fundamentally, Spotfire provides a framework that makes it easier to connect data to custom workflows and visualizations. It can start as a no-code graphical user experience, but data transformations can also make use of Python, R, and SQL out of the box and the user interface can leverage IronPython, HTML, Javascript, CSS, and more. The platform has added new “actions” (think of them like macros) that can allow a button click or an intuitive visual to connect users with sophisticated data science tools (nerdy-sounding things like dynamic time warping, kernel density functions, or geospatial joins).
The broad customization comes with a lot of potential complexity though, as these tools may not only contain a set of visualizations but could also incorporate custom code. A case study from Occidental Petroleum showcases the deep functionality of how Spotfire can integrate with source data systems to allow users to not only view data, but also to create and store their analysis back into the source systems. The presentation also shows how they work to manage versions of the tool, with roll-back functionality and user-reporting for issues or feature requests.
Liberty Energy demonstrated another area where the depth of Spotfire’s capabilities was important. Their team built out a set of dashboards to share real-time data with their customers. With a Kafka streaming backend delivering second-by-second updates, the tool also uses custom Javascript interfaces and manages security to protect their customers’ data. For applications like this, Spotfire fills a middle space that simple BI can’t quite reach, but that is still much simpler than coding an application from the ground up.
Finally, a panel of developers discusses how they have been able to leverage the Spotfire platform to create their own software products and gave some insight into how the framework enables high-value tools. Document properties, data functions, and custom-coded interfaces can often be supported natively (and some can even be generated automatically with the recently expanded Spotfire CopilotTM AI Assistant).
The Takeaways
For me there were two main takeaways from the conference. First, Spotfire is specifically targeting the energy industry with new features and outreach efforts. Those features could be really handy if you need a specific visual.
And second, Spotfire’s capability is massive. I think it’s worth seeing Visual Data Science as distinct from Business Intelligence. But this sets up a decision point in my mind. If you have development capabilities and need complex custom calculations (maybe a function written in python or R), or if you need a custom interface (Javascript and HTML), Spotfire is great. It can enable rapid development and make many deployment details much easier to manage. However, those capabilities will likely come with some development and maintenance costs that simpler tools could avoid.
Do you have a problem that requires Visual Data Science, or is it perhaps more of a Business Intelligence question? We’d love to help explore it with you.