To buy, or to build? That is the question… when it comes to Business Intelligence (BI) software. And it’s the subject of part 4 in our series on Jaspersoft’s brand new Embedded Analytics eGuide.
When deciding whether to buy or build embedded analytics, software companies must balance providing a superior customer experience with keeping costs under control. It’s the perennial challenge of trying to do more with the same level of resources.
Deploying embedded analytics into your applications has many compelling advantages. When TechTarget asked 55 software providers why they made the decision to buy, 51% said it would enable them to provide best-in-class BI functionality to their customers. 49% also said they’d prefer their developers focus on the company’s core product.
However, this isn’t a decision that’s taken lightly. Even if you know why you want to buy embedded analytics software, decision makers must still answer the who and what.
The situation is complicated further by the array of products on the market, especially when some applications for mining and analyzing data are temptingly easy to get started with. But, like most things worth doing, it isn’t easy to create an analytics UX that your customers love to use. Many solutions might be easy to roll-out, but may soon struggle to meet the requirements of your customers.
Some BI vendors, for example, charge per user. It would be time consuming to have to negotiate with your vendor every time you make a sale, or when an existing customer wants to add or remove users. This is potentially costly, not only in terms of time, but also in the uncertainty it creates over margins and pricing.
In today’s SaaS-dominated market, another deal-breaker must surely be multi-tenancy support. This is critical to enable software companies to securely, efficiently and flexibly deliver embedded BI to customers—especially in the cloud era. The best BI solutions allow companies to ship common reports to all customers, while catering for specific customer requirements on an individual basis as necessary.
Of course, all this also depends on the architecture. If software it not properly deployed, it’s just code, so BI tools must integrate with a plethora of architectures, source control systems and modern APIs like REST and Javascript.
If you’re a product manager exploring which embedded analytics solutions are best for your business—or even if you just need a set of criteria that you can use to make your decision—take a look at the Jaspersoft eGuide. Embedded Analytics: A new era of competitive advantage for software makers describes the market forces driving embedded analytics, and some of the pitfalls of building your own BI solution.
Take a look at the Embedded Analytics eGuide today, and answer the who, what and why of embedded analytics solutions for your business. Catch up on the first two posts in this series here, and stay tuned next week for the fifth and final part of the series on Jaspersoft’s Embedded Analytics eGuide.
