Your data gives you a competitive advantage. Data makes your product more valuable to customers, and it can also showcase the value your product creates. Take Spotify. In December, they package and ship Spotify Wrapped – a data product built from your listening trends. Wrapped is entertaining, but it also visually reminds us of how much we used Spotify over the last year.
Plenty of other companies you wouldn’t think of as “data companies” have created similarly delightful experiences with data. In recent years, in-app reports, dashboards, and metrics have become more common in all kinds of products. But despite the popularity, teams still encounter the same alternatives they faced a decade ago: drop everything to build a custom data offering from scratch (including all the necessary infrastructure) or pay a legacy embedded analytics vendor an arm and a leg for something just ‘good enough’ to get up and running quickly.
After years of seeing so many product teams struggle with trade-offs around speed, quality, and cost, I am thrilled to introduce Omni’s new embedded analytics product.
With Omni, you can embed analytics into your product without slowing down product development, relinquishing control of your user experience, or paying an enterprise price tag. Whether you want to launch your first dashboard to increase engagement or monetize your data with a multi-tier experience, we can help you use data to build more ways for customers to engage with your product — while reminding them of the value you deliver.
“We use Omni to help our team at Smart Access better understand our and our customers’ business. Now, our customers can take advantage of the work we put into our unified data model to gain deeper visibility into their frontline operations. We look forward to continuing to partner with Omni, and we trust them to help us deliver an exceptional data experience to our customers.” John White, Founder at Smart Access
The compromises behind build vs. buy
When you’re considering adding analytics into your product, the first decision is almost always build vs. buy. Product development is chock-full of these kinds of decisions — you’re constantly balancing the desire for customized perfection with the unavoidable reality of resource limitations.
As a product person, building something yourself is always tempting. It gives you the freedom to customize every last thing, just the way you want it. But building has its downsides, too. You have to pull product and engineering resources away from other (likely important) initiatives to get it done. Plus, it typically costs more and takes longer, which means you’re leaving would-be customers and revenue generated by your future data product on the table.
These drawbacks lead most teams to buy an embedded analytics product, which has its perks. You get the data infrastructure and expertise of the vendor, features that have already been tested, and components that non-engineers will be able to touch. But, along with the actual price of the contract, buying has another cost: losing control over your user experience. You’ll be constrained by another application, so you won’t be able to build exactly what you want, and you'll have to trust someone else with performance...
...meaning your customers might see this...
…which is not the experience you want to be known for.
Teams that choose to buy over build have been forced to accept ‘good enough’ when they should get something great. At Omni, we set out to fix that.
Fast, flexible embedded analytics
You shouldn’t have to choose between launching quickly and building the data product your customers deserve. What you choose today should also scale with your business — from your very first dashboard to whatever your team dreams up in the future.
Launch beautiful products, faster, with extensible components
We built Omni to look good for our customers, and our customers’ customers too. You can use our extensible components such as iframes, KPI tiles, or even create customized visualizations with markdown elements to combine text and images to quickly curate an experience that’s consistent with your brand and customer expectations.
We didn’t want to launch something we didn’t love to use ourselves, so we tested the embed components in our own app while building usage analytics into Omni, with Omni (all in less than one week!).
Plus, every query uses our intelligent in-database and in-memory cache, so that your customers won’t face the long load times that are all too common with the spinning wheel of death.
Maintain control and scalability with a governed data model
Data products built with Omni leverage our proprietary data model, something most embedded analytics tools don’t offer. Our data model enables your team (e.g. analysts, customer success managers, product managers) to easily create tailored queries and dashboards for customer use — without needing to write SQL or custom code for each customer. Additionally, all queries incorporate our filtering and access control features to leverage all the security compliance checks we have in place.
This makes it faster to securely launch your new embedded analytics to all your customers, and ensures that each user can only see the data they’re supposed to. It also makes your analytics easier to maintain over time, allowing you to make updates once and then instantly deploy new metrics to all your end users. That way, you can easily iterate and expand on your initial offering.
Get expert support to guide your team
When you buy software, you should get more than the tech and a link to a ticketing page — you should get a true partner who is going to make sure you're successful. I believe guidance from our experienced team is something special we can offer at Omni.
Whether you’re trying to identify the metrics that matter to your customers, new ways to monetize, the different levels of customer reporting you should offer with multi-tier pricing, or anything in between, we’re here to support you.
Again, you shouldn’t need endless product and engineering resources or in-house expertise to use data to create and demonstrate value for your customers — and you shouldn’t have to compromise on quality or control either. If you’re interested in adding embedded analytics to your product, we’d love to show you how Omni can help.