Search has Arrived
I’m thrilled to announce that ThoughtSpot has been named a new vendor in the Gartner 2017 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms* report. ThoughtSpot’s debut marks one of the fastest entries ever for a vendor on the Magic Quadrant and signals that search-driven analytics has hit the mainstream. ThoughtSpot has only been available for sale for two years, so this level of recognition shows how much the industry is craving innovation. As a comparison, it took Tableau, the current industry leader, seven years to first land on the Magic Quadrant back in 2010. The pace of change is clearly accelerating.
The analytics market is being disrupted by smart search-driven Interfaces. A trend Gartner sees accelerating by 2020, when, “50% of analytic queries will be generated using search, natural-language processing or voice, or will be autogenerated.”
All of us at ThoughtSpot are incredibly excited to be leading such a significant shift in the analytics landscape. It’s a big honor to be recognized by Gartner—first as a 2016 Cool Vendor and now as a first-time 2017 Magic Quadrant entrant. Our CEO, Ajeet Singh, summarized the MQ news saying, “this moment is bigger than ThoughtSpot. Search has arrived. Our momentum signifies the market’s strong appetite for next generation of analytics technology that goes beyond visualizations.”
By placing ThoughtSpot, the world’s first pure play search-driven analytics solution, on the Magic Quadrant, Gartner has officially put search on the map. But it’s customers who have been the driving force behind this market shift for years. A significant component of the Magic Quadrant vendor evaluations comes from customer surveys. And our industry leading customers—like Bed Bath and Beyond, Amway, Scotiabank, Miami Children’s Health System, Sterling Bank, and several other Fortune 500 customers—have all reported huge benefits from faster data-driven decisions in the form of higher productivity and accelerated growth.
Search is used by Billions
Our vision at ThoughtSpot is to make analytics more accessible to non-technical business people who have been fed-up with the complexity and slow performance of traditional BI tools. Who cares how pretty a chart looks if only a handful of people in the world can build them and only a few people ever see them? Two billion people use search everyday to answer all kinds of questions. There’s no easier paradigm for accessing data than search - so it just makes sense to apply its’ power and simplicity to the world of enterprise analytics.
Gartner also believes in this approach stating that, “search-based data discovery technology can help drive adoption by users resistant to or intimidated by using traditional business intelligence and analytics interfaces for interacting with data, but who are quite comfortable using a search engine to find the information they need.” On average, only 22% of enterprise analytics technology gets adopted. That's just abysmal. Search has the potential to radically change adoption rates and open up the world of analytics to hundreds of millions of business people. It's why we've set a goal of having 20 million people using ThoughtSpot by 2020.
Relational Search: Powering the Next Generation Data Analytics Platform
At ThoughtSpot, we’ve built a business intelligence platform that provides users with an analytics experience that is easy, precise, and fast. But let’s face it, data is complex and messy. So we also needed to build a platform to support complex data at scale—especially if we wanted to radically reduce the time and effort put into data modeling. It’s a big vision, and as it turns out, search and analytics isn’t an easy mix. Which is why we had to build our next generation platform from scratch and power it with a new breed of Relational Search engine.
As Ajeet describes it, “Our Relational Search platform is comprised of several layers of fundamental innovation and is built from the ground up with a singular mission - to deliver access to data at ‘human-scale’ and enable anyone to analyze their data in seconds.”
When it comes to data complexity, Gartner explains that “search-based data discovery platforms can significantly reduce the time, cost and inflexibility of data integration/modeling associated with an enterprise data warehouse and traditional analytics content development, by pushing the ability to explore data to almost anyone in the enterprise who can ask a question using Google.”
We often describe ThoughtSpot as “Google for numbers.” We’ve built the world's most advanced, yet easy-to-use number-crunching machine for data analytics. With the ultimate goal of making it easy for anyone to analyze their company data in seconds.<br>
So What Comes Next?
While being recognized by Gartner as a Magic Quadrant vendor is a significant step forward for ThoughtSpot, our journey is far from complete.
Today we’ve found that 99% of data and insights are being pulled by the user. And while search makes that radically easier, in a few years time we’re likely to see a massive shift as the majority of insights get pushed instead of pulled. We see a huge opportunity to deliver automated insights, powered by the artificial intelligence in our Relational Search engine, to help millions of business people make smarter decisions. Imagine a business analytics software that learns what matters most to teams based on user behavior, automatically identifies anomalies, and then pushes those trends and insights directly to people when it matters most.
Stay tuned, we can’t wait to share what comes next!
*Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms,” by Rita Sallam, Cindi Howson, Carlie Idoine, Thomas Oestreich, James Richardson, Joao Tapadinhas, February 16, 2017.
