In today's era, platform-centric business models with real-time insights and AI-driven workflows, are an imperative than necessity. Business users expect analytics, embedded and seamlessly accessible within their workflows. Also, today's market demands analytics that's part-and-parcel of a product since day one, and continually enhanced with the latest advancements.
Hence for market players like Independent software vendors (ISVs) and SaaS providers, embedding analytics is inescapable. Here are 7 strategic reasons to outline why it is so.
1. Focus on Your Core Product
Today, domain expertise is valued more than ever as the market gets more sophisticated day-after-day. Understanding your customer's evolving challenges and pivoting your platform's capabilities/workflows to address that, is now a survival game. Embedding an analytics platform which is as laser-focused in their core-domain, will turn out to be a positive-sum game, that will open a plethora of possibilities to compete beyond survival.
2. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The major apprehension for embedding analytics is the 'cost' factor. While building a fully-featured analytics module from scratch is entirely under the platform owner's control, it might take months or even years to be optimally-par with the core-platform. The cost of engineering resources utilized to achieve that, along with the opportunity losses due to sub-optimal analytics that lags behind market demands, will definitely add up higher.
Today's analytics market is highly competitive, and it's not hard to find embedded analytics vendors' with competitive, win-win pricing for their best-in-class analytics capabilities. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in such win-win pricing arrangements is very less and the benefits accrued will be higher than usual, resulting in better ROI.
3. Monetize Data
We have moved beyond the times of 'data is the new oil'. Analytics is now a strategic asset that customers are more than happy to pay for. This opens up a myriad of ways for platform vendors to monetize and add incremental review. Products can now add pricing tiers with analytics, upsell with premium dashboards or by offering advanced analytics capabilities. This will also strengthen customer lock-in and boost life time value.
4. Delivery of Gen-AI Experiences
Business users today don't just settle for bar charts, tables and dashboards. They like to get 'specific' insights on-the-fly and do ad-hoc analysis in unsophisticated ways. Modern embedded analytics offers user-friendly features like natural language querying, AI-generated insights and Agentic-AI frameworks that move beyond insights to complete the desired actions.
5. Collaboration at scale
Today's embedded analytics platforms play beyond insights and are key drivers of data democratization. They offer a plethora of collaborative features like sharing insights via real-time messaging, automated alerts/push notifications, contextual comment threads and much more that reduces the 'insight-to-action' gap and accelerates decision-making at all levels of an organization.
6. Leverage Modern Architectures
In today's high-tech digital era, the scale of events handled and data generated in an hour across mobile, IoT, web, and enterprise systems is unprecedented. Modern embedded analytics are built over architectures that scale seamlessly to handle data - be it from historical batches or real-time streams, for hundreds to millions of users. This ensures that you always stay on-par with growth and performance demands.
7. Extensible Platform Frameworks
There are situations where an ISV or SaaS vendor should tweak or customize or even build-over what an embedded analytics platform offers, to meet their unique needs. Modern analytics platforms are mindful of that and offer frameworks for extensibility in the form of APIs, SDKs for JavaScript/React/Angular, white-label capabilities, custom branding, integration support etc.
How to Choose the Right Embedded Analytics Solution
When evaluating an embedded analytics platform, consider the following checklist:
White-labeling: The platform must offer seamless UI-integration tailored to meet your specific branding requirements.
Continuous Innovation: Check out on their regular updates and do extensive research to verify if their roadmap is aligned with future trends.
Total Cost of Ownership: Evaluate the platform's pricing models for its transparency and compatibility with your own requirements/expectations.
Data Governance & Security: It is a must for any embedded analytics platform to ensure data privacy and security. The proof of that can be found in evaluating their declared accreditations (ISO/IEC) and compliances with GDPR, HIPAA etc.
Conclusion:
Embedding analytics is no longer a discretionary 'nice-to-have. It is a must-have for ISVs and SaaS providers looking to differentiate, monetize data, accelerate growth and deliver modern user experiences. If you’re ready to take your product strategy into the next decade, consider partnering with an embedded analytics platform like Zoho Analytics that gives you speed, flexibility, and continuous innovation.
Want to see how Zoho Analytics can power your data product? Contact us for a live demo and embed-strategy consultation.
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