Ending the Great Build vs Buy Embedded Analytics Capabilities Debate

Independent software vendors (ISVs) play a major role in accelerating the pace of technology innovation within their specific market. However, the limitations of traditional analytical and business intelligence (BI) platforms and tools can inhibit developers in addressing the dynamic, evolving needs of end users.?

Ronald van Loon is a Yellowfin partner and journeyed into the capabilities of the Yellowfin analytics platform to explore how it helps developers enhance analytical experiences in their software applications.?

End users want easy-to-build, interactive reports in any application. From customizable reports, to in-depth analysis and user-friendly interactive visualizations and natural language, automatic explanations to turn insights into actions.?

Developers must reimagine how they deliver embedded analytics content in their software that meets the needs of their end users while simultaneously responding to increasing pressure from their own sales and marketing teams to go live quickly in a competitive market.

Developers Choice: Building vs Buying Analytics

Developers have two choices to deliver analytics users: either build everything from scratch in-house, or embed advanced analytics capabilities into their software applications.?

This is a classic dilemma for software vendors providing SaaS applications, particularly because analytics hasn’t traditionally been a prioritized feature. The majority of applications are commonly developed with standalone, bolt-on analytics.?

However, there’s a profound shift happening today as more organizations want to be wowed with powerful and slick analytics, such as automated data insight discovery, so they can improve their decision making. Also, ISVs want to get their technical debt under control and devote less time to developing, maintaining, and future-proofing analytics capabilities. Meeting the expectations of both sides can be overwhelming for ISVs.

Below are some key considerations in this build vs buy debate:

Build your own business intelligence and advanced analytics capabilities:

• Development and deployment difficulties can result in go-to-market delays, slower integration, and longer time to trigger revenue from analytics.
• Offers complete control, but requires a substantial portion of a development team’s attention as well as existing expertise and knowledge to build and update analytics.
• Can be challenging to keep pace with competitors who offer seamless, specialized embedded analytics capabilities.
• End users may turn to external BI tools to transform data into insights, or plague the tech teams with custom data export requests if the analytics experience fails to meet their expectations.?
• May result in security risks due to lack of restricted user access or inability to enable single-sign on, or multi-tenant deployments.

Buy embedded advanced analytics capabilities:

• Ability to rebrand to improve customer engagement, user workflows, merge dashboards and charts into various application pages, and offer contextualized analytics via a completely embedded, white label user experience (UX).?
• Enable core resources to focus on maintaining and improving their primary product and revenue generator.?
• Launch faster via an analytics partner that can provide full support for the initial integration, and dashboard and reporting development best practices.
• Seize the opportunity to act on new revenue opportunities, such as upselling automated insights or data storytelling as additional services.?
• Meet the stringent standards of design and UX teams with the ability to build detailed, visually appealing, and highly interactive reports and dashboards.
• Improve the analytical experience for customers by enabling them to easily and automatically uncover insights with machine learning driven data discovery.
• Integrate data science models into reports and dashboards with low code and no code functionalities and common web languages.
• Augment security models with single sign-on, strict user access controls, and multi-tenant deployments.
• Invest in a license fee.

Globally, the embedded analytics market is anticipated to increase from $56.27 billion in 2022 to $95.78 billion by 2026, demonstrating the growing demand for these capabilities to augment decision making - and specialist analytics vendors offer faster, easier ways to integrate BI and go live for product teams without the in-house expertise to build analytics.

For example, Civica’s library management software features embedded analytics and business intelligence (BI) using Yellowfin and is currently used in libraries throughout Australia, and over 360 Ministry of Education schools across Singapore. In library applications, the tool empowers staff to make data-driven decisions, like refreshing their library inventory according to historical use. In education applications, the tool transforms data into actionable insights to improve school systems, policies, and analytics for student growth.

The Sustainable Value of Embedded Analytics?

Ultimately, the choice is simple - embedded analytics capabilities that provide tangible advantages to their end users. With embedded analytics, ISVs have a massive opportunity to be indispensable to their customers by alleviating their high-value data and analytics challenges and transforming their analytics experiences - and many vendors today offer product teams fast, easy ways to rapidly and seamlessly integrate these powerful capabilities at scale.?

Be sure to check out more from Yellowfin to learn more about the power of embedded analytics capabilities.