It’s no secret that big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix are not only leveraging data but also delivering embedded analytics and insights as a standard functionality of their software, services, applications and toolkits. The analytics appear to consumers as recommendations, usage habits and other helpful information. Such insights not only help consumers extract the most value out of the product they are using but also help providers understand how they can provide better services. Businesses that embed analytics to provide a differentiated user experience also have a direct impact on engagement and revenue.
Have you considered how embedded analytics could differentiate your company’s own software and hardware products? Let’s understand how embedded analytics can help transform technology businesses:
1. Analytics are expected and welcomed in your products
By embedding analytics into existing enterprise software and applications, users can drill down into real-time and context-aware data (for example: How busy a location will be at various times of the day) and can benefit from faster data-driven decision-making without worrying about application compatibility. Commonly, software applications provide in-app analytics to delight and serve their customers, while hardware companies can provide helpful stats on a web portal or app.
2. Embedded analytics is easier than ever today
Cloud technology has completely disrupted tech-enabled industries. It’s easier than ever for software, apps and hardware to connect to a data repository to save logs that are a rich source of analytics. The invention of the S3 bucket and object store has made it fairly cheap to keep log data. Finally, the transition to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) has fundamentally added an “easy button” to tracking consumption patterns and resource utilization.
3. Embedded analytics helps design better products and services
Embedded analytics can give businesses more insight into application telemetry (how customers use the data, how they engage with the product) and provide insights into the challenges they face from a usability standpoint. Providers can use advanced analytics to quickly iterate, draw patterns and make predictions, troubleshoot customer challenges, discover new avenues to monetize, detect and mitigate security threats or create entirely new features and applications that put customers on a faster path to improved application experience and better decision-making.
4. Embedded analytics increases operational efficiencies
The tech industry is transitioning from traditional monolithic architectures where applications are self-contained to microservices architectures where different components are spun up as needed via API calls. By embedding analytics directly into developer tools, businesses can manage resources without sacrificing availability or performance. Companies can allocate and optimize resources dynamically and understand peaks and valleys in consumption. Businesses must be able to leverage historical and real-time data to build predictive models to proactively identify and mitigate issues with individual components of the application before the customer experiences a problem.
Embedding Analytics in Your Application
Before you start embedding analytics in your application, it’s important to choose the right database foundation, as this will support current needs and future goals. Below are the top capabilities that should be standard features in analytics databases:
1. Handles massive data volumes: The database must scale easily and efficiently with minimal cost using massive parallel processing. Today’s scale might be terabytes, tomorrow it might be petabytes and so on.
2. Enables speedy data analytics: Speed is a key factor in a positive user experience. Users want instant insights because they don’t like waiting for results. The database should be capable of optimizing load and query performance so that analytics is both timely and relevant.
3. Embeds machine learning: Machine learning algorithms are critical for predictive analytics. A platform that can embed ML and iteratively learn from new data can make a big difference and add a whole new level of intelligence.
4. Features native integrations: The more time developers spend figuring out tools and integrations, the less time is spent innovating. The platform must ideally have out-of-the-box integrations with popular applications, data sources (on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid), ETL, and visualization tools (e.g., Microstrategy, Looker, Power BI, Qlik, Tableau). It should be flexible enough to support user-defined functions for things that don’t have native integration.
5. Encourages self-service: The database should make it easy for data scientists to leverage tools and programming languages they already know such as R, Java, C/C++, Python and SQL. Data scientists will also appreciate a platform that has built-in functions for a wide range of analytics (such as geospatial, time-series, event-series, real-time, machine learning, text analytics, pattern matching and regression) and delivers the tools to spot trends, uncover anomalies and anticipate the unexpected.
6. Supports highly advanced analytics: Many platforms can analyze single tables or do a simple look-up but few have the power to analyze dozens of tables, hundreds of data types, dimensions and attributes from numerous sources over several years of history.
7. Unified: The database should be able to streamline everything right from data ingestion to exploration to production until delivery. Users should be able to analyze data in its place to always have a single source of truth.
It’s not hard to visualize that the most disruptive companies of the future will be the ones that harness data as a core asset and embed analytics in their products and services. Embedding analytics requires the right database foundation; to get to the right foundation, IT teams need to cut through the noise and study the fine print. With the proper database, the future is yours to create.
