Build vs. Buy Analytics: Examining the Buy Side Approach

Solutions Review editors examine the buy side of the build vs. buy analytics debate and offer an additional resource from Qrvey for evaluation.

Many factors go into the build vs. buy analytics debate, and even more depends on your customers’ needs. How to choose the best embedded analytics tools can be made easier if you have the right guidance and perspective, but it’s not always easier to plug-and-play with analytic software. It’s also one of the reasons why our editors recommend reading Embedded Analytics for Saas Providers, which highlights quite well one side of the conversation.

Embedding analytics into existing workflows helps business users gain access to the capabilities they need without having to go outside of the environments they use daily to do so. Users are often rewarded with faster, more informed, and more efficient decision-making, which can lead to more actionable insight.

Embedded BI: Build vs. Buy Analytics

The process for buying embedded analytics or a standalone tool are very different. Buyers should be aware that embedded BI requires analysis flexibility and ease of analysis for non-technical users. Other major factors include the processing of embedding seamlessly into the host application, lifecycle management, and distribution at scale.

Whether the build vs. buy analytics discussion for your embedded project is coming now or in the future, there are some key embedded BI use cases you need to know: self-service analytics, governed data democratization, and increasing user adoption. Per MIT, companies that are more likely to share data between users are the ones that reap the rewards, as innovation with analytics is a nearly direct result of this democratization.

As someone who works with data, you already know the value of analytics. The more metrics, insights, and analytic types you add to your embedded products, the more engagement they will receive. The decision then comes to whether or not you have the stomach to build your own in-house analytics system or invest in an existing platform that can easily be added into your software.

Embedded analytics are flexible enough to serve users in many industries. And there are more than a few markets specifically where interest in embedded BI tools is high, like in e-commerce, finance, and marketing.

There are a lot of good reasons to avoid building your own analytics, and many are well-known. However, it’s not understood just how high the opportunity costs are, and it’s true that building is more expensive than one might think. Sometimes, the right build vs. buy analytics decision for product managers is the most obvious one, whatever that means in your specific situation.

Read Qrvey’s Embedded Analytics for SaaS Providers: Build vs. Buy