Users expect apps to provide an analytics dashboard that can help them make sense of the relevant data from external users.
Of course, that is easier said than done, since building this feature from scratch is a resource-intensive task.
That's why embedded BI is becoming increasingly popular among businesses that want to add analytics functionality to their software, such as embedded analytics in business intelligence.
The idea is simple: you partner with a BI company and integrate their power BI software into your product instead of developing these features in-house with your own BI tool.
However, business owners are often hesitant to go this route because it means giving up control over their products.
This is a perfectly understandable concern. Completely outsourcing an important feature of your product, such as embedded business intelligence, introduces various issues that make one question whether it's worth it.
But it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You are not limited to either developing all analytics features in-house or completely outsourcing the entire analytics functionality. You can instead find a unique solution that works for your business and your business analyst.
And today we are going to show you how.
Option 1: Provide an Add-On for Embedded BI
Your development team can build the core BI functionality, which provides all customers with a basic set of data analytics features, such as predictive analytics.
Then, instead of developing the advanced features in-house, you can take advantage of the Yurbi Premium app that allows you to offer customers an add-on with additional analytics functionality.
The Yurbi Premium app is a custom integration with your product's database schema that combines user data with a pre-built set of reports and dashboards. It is not the same as the other embedded analytics tools used in business intelligence software.
Here's how it works:
- Yurbi team collaborates with your development team to build a Premium app for your product's database schema.
- We sign a reseller agreement to make the app available to your customers.
- You offer the app as an add-on to your customers.
Option 2: Use Embedded BI For Non-Core Analytics Features
You can also have your development team build the core BI functionality, then use embedded BI to provide advanced analytics features in-app.
This makes sense if you want your team to stay focused on the core product, not be distracted by building ad-hoc solutions from scratch.
It's worth addressing a concern that frequently comes up when discussing embedded BI: consistency.
Business owners and internal users often worry that integrating embedded BI into their software will lead to jarring inconsistencies in their app's UI and the UX.
This is a perfectly valid concern because no one wants to use a product that looks like a patchwork of several apps stitched together.
That's why we want to assure you that here at Yurbi, we take great care to make sure that our solutions are easily customizable for business users of embedded analytics software in any embedded analytics platform for visualization purposes.
You can make them look completely native to your software with a little bit of front-end web development.
Option 3: Start Small, Iterate Over Time
You don't need to implement a sophisticated embedded BI solution from the get-go. You can start small and iterate over time instead.
We typically recommend three ways to use Yurbi:
- Yurbi Premium App. As we have discussed previously, this allows you to provide advanced analytics features as an add-on, with the customers subscribing to a Yurbi app customized specifically for your product.
- Embedded Integration. This allows you to offer advanced analytics features in-app so that your customers wouldn't need to go anywhere to use them. We provide an out-of-the-box solution that you can embed into your application. You can easily brand it and customize it for your UI with a little bit of CSS knowledge.
- Seamless Integration. Our most advanced solution allows you to use Yurbi as your data engine and integrate it seamlessly into your app.
You can think of these three solutions as phases that you can progress through at your own pace as your company grows.
Conclusion
Product development is a balancing act between customers' needs and the resources that you have available to you.
Sure, in an ideal world, you would give your customers every feature they ask for, all built completely in-house.
However, your resources are limited in the real world, so you have to prioritize how you spend time, energy, and money.
Embedded BI can help you free up the development team's time so that they can invest it into improving the core functionality of your product.
But it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. BI tool developers can build some analytics features in-house; they can outsource some. Whatever works for your company.
Book a FREE 30-minute demo with a Yurbi expert to learn how you can leverage embedded BI in your business.