According to a recent report, conducted by a third-party research firm and commissioned by Birst, 74 percent of companies surveyed consider analytics as a new product. Additionally, 71 percent cited gaining a competitive advantage as the primary reason for embedding analytics into products, followed by 45 percent that noted customer retention as the primary motivation. However, half of the companies surveyed that attempted to create in-house analytics products reported being unsatisfied with the results. “At Thomsons Online Benefits, we wanted to create a rich analytics product for our clients,” said James Akers, Lead Product Manager at Thomsons Online Benefits. “We chose Birst because of its unique blend of embedded capabilities, rich user experience and ease of implementation for our clients. Now, we can help our customers leverage data to unlock useful insights and gain greater ROI on their global employee reward programmes. Deploying and building an embedded data product with Birst helps us provide data to clients in a format that is easy to understand, yet comprehensive enough to cover global, regional and local trends.”
To continue delivering value to customers, Birst has unveiled new capabilities that boost time-to-market and deliver improved user experiences. These new capabilities include:
- Dynamic, bi-directional events: New JavaScript APIs enable third-party applications to interact with Birst using bi-directional data filters. With this capability, applications can dynamically update based on events and data signals that happen in Birst. Conversely, Birst can recognize filters from an external application that is embedding it and modify its visualizations accordingly.
- Open visualization framework: Customers can embed custom visualizations, such as D3.js and Google Visualization APIs, in Birst dashboards. Using Birst’s User Data Tier to source these visualizations, customers can access governed data that is optimized for analytics.
- User-level white labeling: In addition to white labeling and defining color themes at the tenant level, Birst’s multi-tenancy option offers user-level white labeling. Customers can define user profiles to offer dynamic and personalized experiences.
- End user data mash-ups: Customers can deploy self-service data preparation and enrichment capabilities to their end users. With this feature, users of Birst-embedded analytic applications can upload and blend their own data with the application data or data from other users, without polluting the governed, centralized data.
- User provisioning with SAML: During the user authentication process, Birst uses the SAML identity attributes to create new users or modify existing ones on-the-fly. For example, the provisioning assigns a given user to a given BI tenant, profile, or user group.
“Both software and non-software enterprises are increasingly recognizing the benefits of building and deploying data products with an embedded solution,” said Brad Peters, Chief Product Officer, Birst. “Used effectively, embedded analytics turn an operational application into a market leading product. With Birst, companies are maximizing their user adoption and achieving competitive advantage.”
