written by
5000fish Team

Use Case: We Need A Business Intelligence and Data Integration Tool That We Can Integrate With Via An API

Use Case and Case Study 4 min read

Data is likely one of your most valuable assets that your company has (the other being your team), but unfortunately, sharing that data with the people who need it, is a more complicated task than it seems.

In many cases, data is spread across multiple databases and security is of the utmost importance. Any data access needs to ensure the end user only has access to the information they are authorized to see.

For software vendors and SaaS providers, this use case is called embedded analytics, and they need a business intelligence tool that not only provides multi-tenant security but also allows them to seamlessly embed reports into their software without additional friction placed on their customers.

That’s not always an easy task though, and if you have very specific report layout requirements, it’s unlikely that any BI tool would be able to work out of the box. You’ll need a highly flexible system with automation capabilities to make data integration play nice with your custom reports.

For large businesses and IT departments, they are faced with the need to share data from multiple databases and to provide single-sign-on capabilities and in many cases to integrate data between applications in a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).

To maintain work efficiency, automation is extremely important, and all of this happens through APIs. You need a data integration tool that can pull together data from multiple sources and make it available to other applications securely.

What if we could create a data reporting solution that allows access to data, and automation of common tasks that doesn’t need any manual steps to work, and is easy to use?

BI Tools Without APIs Won't Solve Your Problems

There are still a number of business applications which do not provide easy ways to integrate with other applications. These become data silos in your organization and create massive holes in workflow automation.

If a customer were to compare two tools, and one of them provided data integration features, they would be likely to choose the one with API capabilities, because that opens up the possibility of tight integration with the rest of their infrastructure, even if it's just something they want to keep as a possibility for the future.

Business Intelligence tools are known for providing a great front-end for display and querying of data sources, but many don't offer a robust API so that the BI tool can provide data integration and data broker services. The ones that do tend to be overly complicated and expensive.

As a consequence, many software vendors looking to embed BI are faced with tools that look great but don't make it easy to integrate into their software, and many internal IT managers are faced with BI tools that provide a front-end to their data silos but don't allow tight integration of data.

Business Intelligence With API Level Integration

Yurbi offers both software companies and IT managers access to a powerful BI tool that was built from the ground up as a web application, designed to meet both of their use cases.

Yurbi not only provides an agile, self-service business intelligence solution for end users, but on the backend, a robust API that can be used for user provisioning, secure data feeds, embedded analytics, and more.

Yurbi can integrate with your data or software using a couple of different API methods.

Restful API

The Yurbi interface uses an HTML5/Javascript interface. Which is great as it can work on any modern desktop, tablet, or mobile browser without requiring a client to be installed. Everything you can do in our interface can also be done via our Rest API (the API can actually do a lot more).

This includes user and security provisioning, retrieving and passing secure data sets to other applications in JSON or XML, configuring scheduled reports and binding secure data sets to your own custom report layouts and output methods. We call our Rest API our mid-tier.

Soap API

Yurbi also has a back-end API, that can only be accessed on the Yurbi server for additional security. The back-end API is SOAP based. Yurbi's SOAP-based API can be used at the server level for integrations and automation such as bulk import of user and security information, copying or syncing Yurbi Apps, dashboards, reports, and folders between Dev, QA, and Production server environments.

Yurbi is extremely flexible, and the use cases for our APIs are nearly endless. You can even insert custom javascript into the Yurbi interface to connect with other software as you see fit. Add buttons or triggers which manually pushes data from Yurbi to your other applications!

Yurbi - BI solution For Modern Businesses

Yurbi is a business intelligence software tool that integrates with your existing automated processes. Software providers and internal IT teams can finally offer their users seamless integrations that combine ease of use with powerful features that you’d expect to find in much more complicated enterprise-level products.

Data security is not just maintained but also greatly improved by using Yurbi. This keeps everyone happy, the end users that have seamless access to data, the data owners who require tight security, and the IT managers who demand work efficiency all around.

Want to learn more about Yurbi? Contact us today to see what Yurbi’s powerful APIs can do for your business.

API Integration White Label Embedded Analytics Yurbi Use Case Services Oriented Architecture SOA