2 years & 1 transformational product: Remembering the launch of ThoughtSpot Embrace

ThoughtSpot Embrace turns 2 today, marking the beginning of live search and AI-generated insights on ALL your cloud data. No extracts, no caches, no cubes or aggregate tables.?

It also marks my 2-year anniversary of a transformational trip to Bangalore – life before a pandemic.

Prior to January 2020, most customers were using Falcon, ThoughtSpot’s own in-memory, MPP database. Its scalability was well-proven and unmatched by any other BI vendor, with some customers analyzing 80 Terabytes of granular data in a single application. Some early adopters of Snowflake and Redshift were excited about the roadmap for ThoughtSpot Embrace, but in 2019, the majority of Fortune 500 enterprise customers were in no rush to move their data to the cloud, particularly in data heavy industries like financial services and telco.

Who could have predicted how much cloud migration plans would accelerate throughout 2020? As the pandemic took hold, it quickly became clear speed and agility would prove not only to be a competitive advantage, but a matter of business survival.

Showing Embrace for the first time at Beyond 2019

On its face, a live SQL query may not sound revolutionary - but what it enables for search is. The challenge with search—then and now—is that it must be instantaneous, sub-second. Users might settle for a report or dashboard that takes several minutes to execute, but not to get an answer to a search. Just ask yourself: would you wait even 5 minutes for Google to generate a search result??

I recall ThoughtSpot’s Beyond user conference in October 2019 in Dallas. In a room filled shoulder to shoulder, Cisco presented their beta experience of ThoughtSpot on Snowflake. The excitement was palpable. Customers asked us to accelerate our roadmap. Prospects asked when they could get their hands on Embrace. As one Google BigQuery customer said to me then, “Only 10% of our data is accessible to ThoughtSpot. I want it ALL searchable via ThoughtSpot.” Everyone in that room wanted Embrace. And they wanted it now.

Innovation at a breakneck pace

I recall seeing the timeline to bring Embrace to all four major cloud platforms, Snowflake, Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Azure SQL. The goal? Deliver by January 31st ,2020. That was just three months!

I was skeptical to say the least. I had spent years as an industry analyst watching BI vendors try to shift from in-memory analytics to live query for years. None had much success, with the solutions doing little more than a check box for RFPs. None were used in production. Now, keep in mind I had also only been with ThoughtSpot less than six months and I was not yet accustomed to the “not impossible” mindset I’ve come to love here. To borrow a line from author and entrepreneur Mick Ebeling, the product team had a motto to “Commit. Then figure it out.”? This motto only works because of our culture of Selfless Excellence, clearly demonstrated when the lead product manager for Embrace moved from California to Bangalore to lead the team heading up Embrace.

ThoughtSpot also had another advantage in its favor: Falcon is a SQL-based database. There is no DAX dependency to complicate things like in Power BI, or proprietary VizQL like in Tableau, or proprietary scripting language needed for Qlik. Thus, the SQL generated was already well-tuned, built for scale, and robust analytical queries from the beginning.

As we stood in the Bangalore ThoughtSpot offices celebrating achieving this milestone, a day early, in fact, on January 30, we enjoyed cake and laughter, in person. I will remember this as just one milestone in the last two years that marked not only ThoughtSpot’s, but the entire industry’s wholesale shift to cloud.

Since that moment, I’ve watched how quickly ThoughtSpot delivered a SaaS product a few months later, expanded to modern embedded analytics with ThoughtSpot Everywhere, SpotApps powered by TML, and executed two acquisitions with Diyotta and Seekwell to bring insight to action - rapid innovation based on customers' needs. What started with 4 Embrace integrations has expanded to other platforms such as Databricks Delta Lake and Starburst. (No wonder the valuation more than doubled in this short time!) While the company’s mission remains the same, collectively the Modern Analytics Cloud has changed our distribution and reach. I’ve had the privilege of working with the best customers in the Fortune 500 but, now, also all these creative, ambitious digital natives as they transform their organizations to be data-driven in our digital world.?

I’m hoping 2022 will also herald a return trip to Bangalore. The team promised me a cricket game and samosas on my next trip. I’m still waiting!

Thank you Ryan Mattison for always helping me write better, Amit Prakash for checking my technical details, and Anjali Kumari for confirming my memories!

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