The Importance of Purpose-Built Embedded Analytics Software

Not all analytics products have been designed to be embedded.

Historically speaking, analytics software has undergone a tremendous transformation. From the first databases, structured data, and canned reports in the 1950s, ’60s, and 70s to today’s powerful and advanced analytics software that has become increasingly important for organizations of all industries and sizes for their ability to gain business insights and provide tailored responses to customers.

Analytics software brings its user a plethora of benefits. Because not every business can (or is worth) building its own in-house analytics solution, choosing purpose-built embedded analytics is vital.

Embedded analytics software delivers real-time reporting, interactive data visualization, and advanced analytics capabilities, including machine learning and AI, directly into an enterprise business application.

What Is Purpose-Built Technology? 

Purpose-built technology is a term used to define a software solution that has been specifically designed for the purpose its users are using it for. In the analytics space, a purpose-built embedded analytics solution is software that is designed specifically to support the needs of organizations in different industries that rely on the data they possess to make better business decisions to improve productivity and increase their profits.

This purpose-built analytics technology will include self-service and advanced analytics capabilities that allow juggling multiple data projects between departments at the same time.

What Does Purpose-Built Embedded Analytics Software Do? 

In essence, purpose-built analytics software frees you and your developers’ time to do what you already do best by integrating seamlessly into your apps and allowing everyone within your organization, regardless of skills and expertise, to access and analyze data and build custom reports and dashboards independently.

Instead of having to continually export data to spreadsheets and switch between multiple software solutions, purpose-built embedded analytics software is created from the ground up to provide everything that an organization needs to effectively answer their business questions and extract actionable insights out of their data.

A purpose-built embedded analytics solution also comes with native web, cloud, and mobile delivery, making it easier for developers to create custom analytics applications.

What Is the Hurdle of Non-Purposely Built Embedded Analytics Software? 

Many of today’s embedded analytics platforms started out by building web and desktop-based dashboard tools as standalone applications. With time and increasing customer demands, most of these embedded analytics vendors decided to create an embedded option.

And although that sounds good, the problem with it is that while creating a seamless embedded experience is not rocket science, it is still hard, especially when the solution hasn’t been built from the ground up with embedded in mind first.

When the analytics software hasn’t been purposely built to be embedded in other applications, the process of integrating it into your own apps becomes a lot more complicated. It adds tremendous complexity, requiring tricky and troublesome integration with your back-end proprietary system. The time needed to set it up will take much longer – and that would be a time waster for your developers who, instead of focusing on their domain expertise and what your business was initially designed for, will be burdened with the task to get up your new analytics tool and running (and working).

Embedded analytics tools provide no value if they are too complex to begin with, so it is important to make sure that the vendor you choose to integrate into your apps can be fully and seamlessly embedded into the apps that your users use daily.

NB: Many embedded analytics vendors claim to be fully embeddable, but that is not entirely true. Look for software that was really built from scratch, specifically to be embedded—more on how to do that in the next section.

How to Find Out if the Analytics Software Was Purpose-Built for Embedded? 

To extract real value from an embedded analytics solution and leverage all the potential that your organization’s data has, look for a vendor that was purposely built to be embedded into the apps your users, customers, and employees alike, use in their daily workflow. To make sure a vendor has been purposely built to be embedded, ask them these questions:

• Was embeddability an afterthought, or was it designed for embeddability from the ground up?
• Does the user get the full app experience?
• Can users go beyond simply viewing dashboards? Will they be able to edit existing dashboards and add new ones as well?
• Are there limitations in the embedded product when compared with the SaaS or desktop offerings?

But good embedded analytics software offers a lot more than a seamless embedded experience. It’s important that the analytics experience is the same from the desktop to the web to the embedded app on every device. The embedded analytics software that is worth the consideration and investment also support a full stack of integrated analytic functions — from reporting and dashboards to self-service and white-label analytics, alerts, collaboration, data preparation, and machine learning on a unified, scalable architecture with common administrative and management functions. And unlike restricted internal analytics platforms that limit what users can do, purpose-built embedded software provides end-users the freedom to edit visualizations or dashboards or to create their own without the need to write any code.

Also, make sure to look for native SDKs that utilize the specific features of each platform and provide a superior user experience and robust APIs for dashboard rendering, dashboard creation, deep linking in dashboards, and custom UI for data source acquisition.