Top 5 Reasons to Embed Analytics in Your Enterprise Apps

When is embedding analytics into your application the right option? What can it bring to my users? These are all legitimate questions for those who are less familiar with the benefits of embedded analytics and reporting. Here are some of the top reasons to embed analytics in your software applications.

Context is King

There are times when a traditional, enterprise-wide BI deployment does not make sense for your deployment. One of the main reasons organizations choose to embed is to contextualize analytics within a core enterprise application.

With this approach, you eliminate the thought disruption that occurs when people switch between multiple applications when trying to perform a task. Instead users can leverage context-sensitive insights which enhance the effectiveness of existing business applications.

Insights at the Right Cost

Embedded analytics solutions offer a cost-effective means of providing reports and dashboards within your application. These vendors pool their talent and development resources into the most cutting edge analytics technology just so you don’t have to, which is a key point in the debate to buy or build.

This is important as vendors offer multi-faceted tools that can accommodate many different types of use cases, which can be cost saving in the long run should your requirements change.

Finding a solution that complements your application is critical. Consider the performance demands you need and the scalable architecture of the solution you are evaluating. The most demanding applications may need multi-tenancy, single-sign on support, or even clustering technologies.

Self-Service: Business Intelligence is Democratized

When you embed all the features of a BI and analytics into your application, you enable a range of users to immerse themselves in analytics from within the application. Users can now digest and create compelling visualizations on their own — now everyone is a data guru.

Strong, intuitive report design interfaces can provide business and power users the ability to self-service their own analytics and benefits from data insights.

Modern embedded analytics solutions come with zero-training interfaces, drag and drop, and allow you to enable powerful self-service web-based customization and precision report designing tools.

Customized Experience for All Users

Embedded analytics offer in-depth customizability for both branding and designing an analytics workflow that fits both the user and application. Understanding your users is paramount to implementing any BI solution. In this case, customizing the analytics interface helps you tailor analytics to your users. You can place a custom set of analytics controls such as filters, parameters, slice-and-dice, and drilling down giving users context-specific actions that are related to their job.

Secondarily, understanding your applications current workflow can help you understand where analytics is best used. Perhaps you need a reporting tab? Maybe just charts embedded within sections of your application. The possibilities can be limitless.

Build Software Partnerships for Your Needs

Another benefit of embedded analytics is the partnership built with your vendor. Oftentimes, people elect to make their own analytics solution and find that it bites into their resources, leaving them with little attention to their core application, or they lack the resources to build out all the capabilities necessary.

With a software partnership, you gain a host of experts to support your analytics needs and a company involved in the evolution of BI. This means your embedded analytics tool is up to date and compliant to industry standards.

Embedding analytics is all about those contextualized data insights and how we can improve existing applications to enhance workforce efficiency from within the enterprise. In other cases, we embed into a commercial offering to provide insights to consumers and improve an existing product. This can all be achieved from an embedded analytics product — contextualized insights, scalability and performance, self-service, and product partnerships.

About the author: Dean Yao has over a decade of software marketing and product management experience. Prior to leading Jinfonet Software, Dean was a senior product manager at cloud computing startup Nimbula (acquired by Oracle), where he focused on technical best practices, competitive marketing, and product strategy.

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