What is Embedded Business Intelligence (BI)?

Are you tired of having your customers switch between different tools for data analysis? Are you tired of compromising on your SaaS app’s user experience to get better reporting? If so, embedded business intelligence is the answer. Choosing the right analytics solution is important for empowering users to access valuable insights without leaving your application.

What is Embedded Business Intelligence (BI)?

Embedded BI is the integration of analytical capabilities, such as dashboards, reports, charts, and graphs, into SaaS applications. Embedded BI lets users access and work with data in their workflow without switching to a different analytics tool or platform.

Furthermore, embedded BI relies on its ability to serve multiple tenants. Traditional BI is all about single-tenant instances for internal use cases. Embedded business intelligence tools serve external use cases.

Build or Buy – Which One to Choose?

SaaS providers are better off when they integrate an embedded analytics app instead of building one themselves.

But as a technology provider, we certainly understand the inclination to build in-house. You have software developers on staff, and you’re already paying their salaries. They’re also already building the rest of the app anyway, so why not the analytics?

Additionally, you want analytics to be a seamless component, with the same look and feel as the rest of your app. Unfortunately, white-labeling capabilities for embedded analytics solutions are inconsistent between embedded bi tools.

We understand why homegrown is appealing, but there are many solid reasons NOT to build your own analytics.

You can check out our guide to the best embedded BI tools here as well.

Choosing a solution that focuses solely on embedded BI will allow you to:

1) Stay Focused on Your Roadmap

There are limited hours in a day. Spending time on analytics takes away from other tasks on your to-do list. Embedding analytics enables your devs to remain focused on building and improving the components that increase your competitive advantage. 

2) Offer Comprehensive Analytics Functionality 

Early-stage startups building in-house face restrictions in budget, time, staff, and expertise of their team. With these constraints, early-stage startups in particular must be ruthless in determining the scope of their MVP. 

When you use a third-party solution, you can offer a wider variety of options to visualize data. Interactive dashboards that offer editing, filtering, and drilling down are often difficult to build and maintain over time.

3) Build Without In-House Expertise

You already have a team of developers on staff who know UI/UX, web app development, and more, but do they know analytics? Unfortunately, the requisite skills are in short supply.

A shortage of data and analytics skills is one of Gartner’s, “5 Pitfalls When Building Data and Analytics Teams.”

However, buying a third-party product enables you to integrate sophisticated functionality without needing in-house expertise. You’re saving time and money in the long term.

4) Reduce Ongoing Maintenance Efforts

When you do analytics in-house, you also have to manage it in-house. This is something that you might under scope when you release a new app. Caring for your custom SaaS component means more than just fixing issues – it also involves managing the module’s lifecycle. You’ll be adding enhancements to your roadmap on a regular basis with no end in sight.

A third-party platform handles maintenance and improvements, ensuring a steady roadmap for enhancements.

5) Monetize Analytics Easily

Even if you don’t want to monetize your analytics now, it’s a great door to leave door open. Embedding third-party BI capabilities brings greater flexibility moving forward to experiment with different pricing and licensing options.

According to a study of 512 SaaS companies, monetization was four times more efficient than acquisition in improving growth. And, it was twice as efficient than efforts to improve retention. 

You could offer new analytics functionality by:

• including as a free value-add
• increase overall cost, or
• offer optional components for an additional fee.

Being able to run market tests from a pricing standpoint is just as important as testing technical features. With an embedded business intelligence solution, testing all those packaging options doesn’t necessitate a heavy development lift.

On the SaaS Scaled podcast, Dan Balcauski, Founder and Chief Pricing Officer of Product Tranquility, said, “Organizations are absolutely not dedicating enough time to pricing. No one’s getting a bill on their desk saying, ‘You missed out on all this revenue because you’re massively underpriced.’ It’s an invisible opportunity cost.”

What Are the Main Benefits of Using Embedded Business Intelligence?

Get Data Insights Instantly – Without Leaving the App

Switching between apps isn’t too difficult, especially with ‘Windows + tab’, but having information within the main app is best. Embedding insights eliminates friction and eases workflows, while enabling users to get more value from your app.

Build on Existing Knowledge, With No Learning Curve

No matter how user-friendly an app is, there’s always a learning curve. Users benefit from actionable insights in their app without needing to adjust to a different interface.

Make Info Actionable with Workflows

While some tech vendors might use different definitions, “automation” is the ability to enable processes downstream of your analytics. No-code automation workflows empower users to do more with their data right within your SaaS application. With conditional rules, users can add powerful business logic to workflows and applications 

Gain More Users within Each Tenant

Embedding analytics lets users access insights without buying separate BI tools. This makes it easier for your app to share valuable information with more people for informed decision-making. Easy-to-use dashboards and reports can help more employees in a customer’s organization find value in your app. 

As more users get more insight, each customer organization obtains greater value. Your app becomes stickier, reducing churn, and even potentially giving you the opportunity to raise prices.

Expand to Incorporate More Data

In addition to expanding to more users within each org, you can expand by incorporating more data points. Particularly when integrating self-service analytics, each user can gain more insight.

You can use an embedded bi platform to make your product more useful. This tool allows customers to create their own reports with self-service BI.

Reaching more workers and analyzing more information in a company helps make your app important for the company’s goals.

Reduce Churn 

SaaS apps are easy to acquire, deploy, and implement. Unfortunately, that also makes them easier to un-implement.

According to the BetterCloud 2023 State of SaaSOps Report, 40% of IT professionals consolidated redundant SaaS apps in the past year. 

Reducing churn is one of the many benefits of using embedded BI. Self-service data analysis can further reduce churn. Business users who create reports are less likely to switch vendors and start over.

After all, they already have the information they need. Starting over with a new vendor would mean having to recreate all their reports. This can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Improve Decision Making

Embedded BI improves decision-making, which helps businesses improve every metric. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke describes How Business Intelligence Drives Decision-Making. “Data gathered from a wide range of sources is used to understand and improve proprietary processes in every business function, as well as market conditions and opportunities. BI systems describe past and current conditions through descriptive analytics, make projections and forecasts through predictive analytics, and point to opportunities to guide future actions through prescriptive analytics.”

Drive Real-Time Decision Making

Using BI goes beyond profit margin to give real-time insights and help make future decisions. This becomes even more impactful if your app can automate the analysis of large volumes of historical data.

Business Intelligence aims to help make better decisions, according to the Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® 2023 study. Efficiency/cost and revenue goals are the next most important.

Things to Consider When Evaluating an Embedded Business Intelligence Software

Many business intelligence apps exist, but few address the needs of SaaS companies. And fewer offering embedding that actually meets the multi-tenant analytics requirements of SaaS companies.

The following are important areas to consider with an embedded BI solution.

Built-In Data Management

Embedded analytics starts with data and this is where most companies fail with embedded BI.

Embedded analytics data management needs to have a few things:

1. It must create an analytics data store that includes native multi-tenant security
2. It must connect to ANY data type, whether it’s structured, semi- or unstructured.
3. Include native APIs for ingesting from any data source or on any frequency
4. It should make life easier for development teams, not harder

Security

Self-hosted embedded bi software is going to offer the best in data security. When you can inherit your security policies it makes offering an embedded solution easier for your customers.

But your data must also stay in place. Many industries, like healthcare and fintech, cannot send personal data to a third-party cloud due to security concerns. Therefore, a deployed solution that installs a strong data management layer is the ideal path.

Scalability and Performance

Your users demand applications that are always available with 100% uptime and near-instantaneous performance. Your analytics platform must be able to scale up to meet these demands. SaaS companies also require pricing and licensing that won’t prohibit growth and user adoption. 

Using on-demand technology, such as serverless tech, helps your analytics grow without overspending on infrastructure. Paying for always-on servers hurts scalability and is more expensive.

A Seamless White Label Experience

Your embedded analytics shouldn’t feel disconnected from the host application. Rather than merely placing a chart inside of an iFrame, you need full white-labeling capabilities. Users expect a seamless integration within your SaaS application.

Look for the ability to customize every report and dashboard, font, and color to perfectly match your existing application. Other needs are designs that work on all screen sizes and options for users to customize their experiences.

If iFrames are the only option, run away….fast.

Developer-Friendly Tools & APIs

Your embedded analytics solution must align with the way you build software. That means being 100% SDLC compliant and having developer-friendly (and DevOps-friendly) tools that your team will love working with.

Find a platform with different areas for creating, testing, and launching apps, and simple ways to switch between them.

In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS applications, we understand that embedding a powerful analytics solution is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. At Qrvey, we are the best option for embedded business intelligence. We customize a wide range of features to meet the specific needs of SaaS companies.

My tools make it easy for developers to customize and manage data, leading to a smoother user experience. This helps improve decision-making, retain users, and increase engagement with your app.

Embrace the future of embedded analytics and unlock the full potential of your SaaS application.

Our goal for you is simple: Build less software, and deliver more value.

Get a demo and start a free POC today.