fbpx Skip to content

Taming the Tech Stack: Leverage Your Existing Tech Stack Securely With an Analytics Layer

insightsoftware -
October 24, 2022

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

Taming The Tech Stack Leverage

Analytics and data visualizations have the power to elevate a software product, making it a powerful tool that helps each user fulfill their mission more effectively. To stand apart from the competition, today’s software applications need to deliver a lot more than just transaction processing. They must also provide insights that help drive better decisions, alert users to matters that require their attention, and deliver up-to-the-minute information about the things that matter most.

Software companies that do this effectively will win customer loyalty, earn positive reviews, and  ultimately gain market share. Those who do it poorly are likely to get a lukewarm reception, falling further and further behind the competition.

Adding world-class analytics to your application is easier said than done. There are multiple ways to approach the challenge, but it’s important to be aware of the pros and cons. In this article, we’ll address the various ways that software companies (including SaaS vendors) can build analytics into their products. We’ll talk about the advantages and drawbacks of each one and the pitfalls of which you should be aware as you decide which approach is best for you.

Conventional Approaches to Adding Analytics to an Application

Ask a developer how they might approach the task of adding built-in analytics, and you’re likely to hear a common theme from most of them. “We can build that ourselves.” Typically that involves using UI component libraries to serve as the fundamental building blocks of the presentation layer, filtering datasets and feeding those to a custom UI built around those components.

From a developer’s perspective, this is an opportunity to create something from scratch, painting their masterpiece on a blank piece of canvas. Like many software projects, though, things are more complicated than they first appear. The functional limitations of selected UI components may not be apparent until the project is well under way. Each component must be configured and themed separately, which is time-consuming and may lead to inconsistencies in the behavior of the resulting application. This approach also introduces risk when it comes to integration and upgrades, creating potential headaches further down the road.

Using third-party libraries also creates some challenges with respect to security, which must be implemented separately for each UI component. In a world rife with security risks, that should be a concern to every software vendor.

Traditional business intelligence platforms offer another alternative, but full-stack BI solutions tend to be difficult to use and maintain, typically requiring a team of full-time specialists, and little or no self-service capabilities. If your software company is aiming to deliver low TCO, high ROI, and ease of use, then traditional BI is generally a poor choice.

Application Imperative: How Next-Gen Embedded Analytics Power Data-Driven Action

Download Now

As cloud computing has advanced in popularity, data discovery applications have evolved rapidly to handle very large datasets, offering graphically rich displays such as heat maps, pie charts, and geographical maps alongside pivot tables for multi-dimensional analysis.

Although data discovery applications have their place, they’re not designed to seamlessly integrate with an existing application’s workflows. They sit outside of your application, making it impossible to embed their analytics capabilities into an existing application such that it is aligned with the workflows, roles, and individual tasks that the application supports. Data discovery applications also offer very limited customization, making it difficult to maintain consistent branding or control the end-user experience.

The Better Approach: Embedded Analytics

Embedded analytics offers a comprehensive approach to the problem, providing out-of-the- box functionality that enables your product development team to create customized dashboards and reports, provide a flexible self-service experience to end users, connect to and leverage the power of modern data sources, and offer simple implementation options, including cloud deployments.

Embedded analytics gives developers the ultimate flexibility to build powerful and insightful reports and dashboards into their applications, without the drawbacks associated with the three approaches already discussed.

With an embedded analytics development environment, software teams can avoid getting bogged down in intensive data modeling efforts, instead streamlining data connectivity to a broad range of modern data sources and formats. That includes connectivity to modern data stores such as NoSQL, multisource, streaming, and search engine sources using data connectors built specifically for each source. A single embedded analytics solution opens up a multitude of possibilities, available out of the box. That means developers can focus their time on adding truly engaging (and user-customizable) analytics content to your application.

Today’s customers are demanding self-service analytics that allow users to create, modify, and share their own dashboards and reports. Historically, that has required a trade-off between control over the user experience and the freedom of self-service. Modern analytics offers a different approach that incorporates data access, data governance, and dashboard interactivity – simplifying access to information. This not only allows users to view data, but also to interact with their analytics content, perform ad-hoc analysis, and securely collaborate with others in their organizations.

Embedded analytics helps to avoid the problem of application-switching, wherein users must toggle between your application and a separate BI or data discovery application. That enables a “single-pane” view with your product, leading to deeper user engagement and higher adoption rates. Stated differently, your application is more valuable to your customers and their end-users when it has powerful, intuitive analytics built directly into it.

The Definitive Guide to Embedded Analytics

Download Now

Logi Analytics

The Logi embedded analytics solutions from insightsoftware enables development teams to add powerful data analytics capabilities to any software product, whether your product is a cloud-native SaaS solution or a traditional on-premise application.

Logi Analytics is an intuitive, developer-grade embedded analytics solution that leverages your existing tech stack, allowing you to quickly build, manage, and deploy your application with the powerful analytics that differentiate your product from the competition.

Logi supports unlimited customization and white labeling, so you have total control to make the application uniquely your own. Over 2,200 application teams already trust Logi to help power their businesses with sophisticated industry-leading analytics capabilities.

To learn more about Logi, get in touch for a free, no-obligation demo.

Get a Demo

Logi Composer is the top rated low-code, turnkey analytics solution for dashboards and data visualization.