Embedded Analytics: Should You Buy or Build?

Embedded analytics dashboards can help organizations to democratize data and optimize it to maximize returns on investment (ROI), strengthen competitive advantages, and provide easily accessible insights for revenue growth. It integrates interactive data visualization, real-time reporting, and advanced analytics capabilities directly into an enterprise business application to enhance the product’s value proposition.

Creating an embedded analytics solution offering gives rise to a significant question that bothers several organizations – Should we build or buy? Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, leading to greater confusion. The right choice, however, depends on what suits your business’ embedded analytics requirements the best. Purchasing a pre-built embedded analytics platform package or pre-built embedded BI solutions can be a good option for organizations that need to quickly deploy analytics capabilities and do not have the in-house expertise or resources to develop them. In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of buying and building embedded analytics solutions. Let’s begin.

Buying Embedded Analytics

Today, analytics tools are developed to seamlessly embed into your enterprise business application in order to provide a single unified look with high-quality features. Purchasing a pre-built embedded analytics solution may entail the outsourcing of building and maintaining the said embedded BI tools. This option is incredibly suitable for organizations that lack in-house expertise or resources to build embedded analytics platforms but need to deploy those capabilities quickly.

Advantages of Buying Embedded Analytics

Here are a few notable advantages of buying embedded BI tools or analytics solutions:

1. Purchasing embedded analytics offers a faster time-to-market. Implementation of readily available embedded BI solutions implies that development time is saved and the software can be quickly integrated. As a result, faster deployment, insights, decision-making, and profitability can be achieved.
   
2. The cost-effectiveness of buy embedded analytics. Lower upfront and overhead costs are a given when it comes to purchasing pre-built embedded analytics solutions. Development costs for embedded analytics dashboards are completely omitted, and overhead maintenance costs are reduced as well.
   
3. It offers access to user-friendly interfaces and advanced features. Purchasing an embedded analytics solution can grant access to advanced features and functionality that may not be achievable through internal development. Certain vendors offer machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics capabilities, which can enable organizations to extract more profound insights from their data. Additionally, these capabilities are offered with a user-friendly embedded analytics dashboard that is easy to navigate and use for non-technical users.
   
4. It entails the availability of ongoing support and maintenance. Updates, bug fixes, and other forms of ongoing maintenance and support are a part of the package deal when you purchase embedded analytics business intelligence software. It allows organizations to optimize their investment while freeing up the core team to focus on other value-generating tasks.
   
5. Security and compliance are often guaranteed. Purchasing the solution often implies the availability of state-of-the-art security measures and fulfilled compliance requirements. By effectively evaluating the embedded analytics platform that you’ll potentially purchase, you can ensure the availability of exemplary security and fulfilled compliances without additional charges.

Disadvantages of Buying Embedded Analytics

Here are a few critical disadvantages of buying embedded analytics solutions:

1. It may offer limited customization along with overlapping features. Previously built embedded analytics solutions have a set of features that may not necessarily meet all your business’ embedded analytics requirements. Additionally, such a tool may have a set of overlapping features, which may prove to be redundant for your use case.
   
2. There are vendor limitations and lock-in issues with purchasing embedded analytics. Vendors can have resource or skill limitations that lead to lower customization or poor scalability of the product over time. Additionally, the embedded analytics platform may be dependent on the specific vendor for updates and maintenance, leading to lock-in issues that may stop you from going to another vendor for solutions.

Purchasing and embedding an analytics tool can offer a high-performance and scalable solution that addresses resource limitations. However, before selecting embedded BI solutions, organizations should carefully evaluate certain factors to ensure it is the right fit for their business requirements. Some embedded analytics examples are known embedded analytics platforms like Tableau and embedded analytics SAP. Some Tableau-embedded analytics examples are drag-and-drop features, interactive visualizations, and web authoring.

Gauging the Feasibility of Building Embedded Analytics

Building an in-house embedded analytics solution on top of your existing solutions implies that the software runs as a part of your existing solution while offering the specific features you require. This may entail the use of more money, effort, and resources than buying the embedded analytics platform.

Advantages of Building Embedded Analytics

Here are a few notable advantages of building embedded analytics solutions:

1. It is incredibly helpful for projects of a smaller scale. Small scale projects that have a limited set of requirements can be easily executed with in-built embedded BI solutions. It requires a limited set of resources and investments and hence, can be conveniently managed.
   
2. There is complete control of the solution. When you build an embedded analytics solution internally, there is complete control over how the solution will look, feel, and function. Its quality can be adjusted according to your brand, and its scalability can also be adjusted according to your business requirement or embedded analytics examples considered exemplary that are already available in the market.
    
3. It allows greater customization. As you have complete control of the solution, it can be customized for features according to what you need. Customized functionalities can be helpful for your business in the long run. You can also incorporate desirable features available in different pre-built embedded analytics examples.

Disadvantages of Building Embedded Analytics

Here are a few critical disadvantages of building embedded BI solutions:

1. It takes a longer time to develop and market. The timelines for developing and deploying the solutions increase exponentially with building the analytics solution in-house, as embedded analytics dashboards can be complex to develop.
   
2. It is cost intensive. High costs go into developing an embedded analytics dashboard. These costs pertain to hardware, software, human resources, and other necessary resources to support as well.
   
3. It requires the availability of dedicated and skilled staff. You require in-house teams that are relevantly skilled and experienced to develop the embedded analytics solution.

The Build vs Buy Debate is Pointless When You Have Avant-grade Technology Enabler

So now that you know what the main differences and pros and cons of building vs are buying embedded analytics software, we hope that you can make a better decision for your business needs. Building an embedded analytics solution gives users added authority over the solution’s functionality and customization. However, buying embedded BI solutions saves a significant chunk of time and money.

Choosing the right embedded analytics software is very important and can skyrocket your business when partnering with the right vendor.  Tableau is a noteworthy embedded analytics example that can be purchased.

As a Tableau Gold Partner, Team Uneecops has enabled over 100+ BI implementations and have 75+ data analytics experts.  With the Tableau BI tool and its features, Uneecops helps businesses drive meaningful decisions with data. We’re consistently investing in Tableau’s business analytics tools, including machine learning, statistics, natural language, and intelligent data prep.

We can help you start or enhance your media enterprise transformation – no matter where you are in your journey. Build better, connected, next-generation media experiences with Uneecops x Tableau. Begin now!

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Reach out to sales to discuss the future of a tailored holistic Analytics Solution or explore a free trial here. And be sure to check out more from Uneecops to learn more about the power of embedded analytics capabilities.