Embedded Analytics: From Data Democratization to Monetization

Many organizations today recognize that although they generate massive amounts of data, much of it remains untapped. As Michael Lock, VP & Principal Analyst of the Aberdeen Group, describes below, organizations are searching for innovative ways to monetize their data assets by providing ubiquitous data access to users beyond the enterprise.

Today, the number of data consumers has grown rapidly to include, not just employees in different functional roles, but also customers and partners in the extended ecosystem. So as the pace of business continues to accelerate, organizations are constrained by shrinking decision windows during which they can take advantage of their data to impact their business. Data is now every organization’s competitive advantage—but are they doing enough to help their customers and partners get the most from it?

The Limitations of Traditional Embedded BI Approaches

Employees, customers, and partners have long relied on centralized BI or development teams to build reports for data insights. Unfortunately, the further they are from these limited resources, the longer it takes to get answers for their data-driven questions. Similarly, solution providers attempting a “build-first” approach to their analytics capabilities have found it expensive in time and resources.

Consider the case of a Fortune 500 global manufacturer of industrial equipment. One of their primary sales channels is through their network of 1000+ independent dealerships. They share sales, customer, and inventory data—from 3 different systems—with the 1000+ dealers to improve visibility into revenue, orders, availability and usage of equipment.

The BI team at this company used Tableau to publish weekly reports out to the dealers. This was a time-consuming and cumbersome process that consistently left dealers with unanswered questions. Their BI team was constantly backlogged with unending requests for updated reports. This company needed a solution that would not only give their dealer network faster visibility into their data, but also reduce the amount of time their constrained BI team was wasting on producing these reports.  

ThoughtSpot Embedded Search-Driven Analytics

Today, ThoughtSpot is announcing the general availability of a new Embedded Search-Driven Analytics solution available with ThoughtSpot’s Extended Enterprise Edition. Many of our customers have long been using our API’s and embeddable charts and Pinboards to deliver insights to employees, customers, partners, via custom business applications, B2B portals, and workflows. Now, through the power of Relational Search, organizations can offer their data consumers the familiar experience of search and vastly expand the reach of business intelligence. This means everyone—both inside and outside the enterprise—can now benefit from a search-driven experience to analyze data in seconds.

Our Fortune 500 global manufacturing company previously struggling with publishing reports is now powering their custom dealer portal with ThoughtSpot’s embedded search-driven analytics solution. They recognized ThoughtSpot could handle the volume and complexity of their siloed source systems, without creating extra work for their BI team. In addition, ThoughtSpot’s easy-to-use search interface gives the sales and marketing managers at each dealership the ability to do their own ad-hoc analysis across all this data. Dealer sales managers can now easily analyze customer, equipment and invoice data to better understand which customers are ready to buy, increasing their revenue opportunities. Similarly, field service personnel can now search work order and telematics data to proactively serve customers and streamline service delivery.

Billions of rows, millions of users, hundreds of thousands of security groups

ThoughtSpot Extended Enterprise employs a next-generation analytics architecture powered by Relational Search. This new breed of BI architecture and in-memory calculation engine computes answers on-the-fly across billions of rows of data from any source, delivering sub-second performance. No cubes, aggregations, summary tables or data marts are required to optimize for performance. As a result, source data fidelity is maintained, enabling end users to flexibly ask questions on data at any level.

Expanding the reach of business intelligence beyond enterprise boundaries requires a flexible and scalable governance framework that can scale to large numbers of users and security groups. ThoughtSpot provides granular column, object and row-level access control to a single shared data model that scales to hundreds of thousands of security groups. Fine-grained permissions ensure that only authorized users have access to the right set of data, so that organizations like our Fortune 500 manufacturing company can extend analytic capabilities to large partner networks without compromising governance and time-to-insight.

Flexible Ways to Embed ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot offers many options to rapidly inject analytics in custom applications, portals or workflows.

Embedding Relational Search delivers the full power of ThoughtSpot’s search-driven experience into any application. Combine that with pluggable charts and dashboards to embed any visualization into an application’s workflow. An extensive REST-based Data and Metadata API gives customers complete control to flexibly implement a custom look-and-feel on query result sets from ThoughtSpot. In addition, ThoughtSpot provides custom branding, white-labeling and OEM options to maintain a brand-consistent experience.

ThoughtSpot’s mission is to deliver access to data and insights at "human scale" and our embedded analytics platform achieves this mission. To learn more about how ThoughtSpot can help with your embedded analytics strategy to fast track your path from data democratization to data monetization, visit https://www.thoughtspot.com/everywhere.