Customer-Facing Analytics: Should You Build or Buy?

By now, you know investing in business analytics pays off. In fact, Nucleus Research reports for every dollar a company spends on analytics, it gets back $13.01. With that type of ROI, you’re convinced the time for business intelligence is now; and everybody else wants in, too. Your customers are ready for you to deliver advanced analytics, pronto. The biggest question you face is: Do you build your own analytics platform or buy one?

Can You Really Afford to Go It Alone?

Although partnering with a SaaS provider for your BI solution is a much quicker route than building your own analytics platform from the ground up, your choice to “build or buy” depends on more than finding the quickest solution. You’ve got to consider what sort of financial investment is required.

Every day, businesses face growing volumes of data, disparate and new data sources, and more demands from users who want easier access (no matter their location) to data, insight and self-service business intelligence.​ Cloud-based business intelligence solutions can provide scalable, self-service BI for a fraction of the cost of building it yourself.

Whether you’re a Chief Intelligence Officer looking to deliver data and serve up insights to your own employees, or a software developer who wishes to embed advanced analytics in solutions for customers—GoodData cloud-based analytics solutions help you make sense of data, cost-effectively.

Delivering the Insight Isn’t Enough

A recent report from Nucleus Research states “it’s not just enough to code an HTML page that provides the data or an insight” to your end users. To help customers make sense of data, it’s necessary that your BI solution have “a central warehouse attached to a powerful analytics engine along with an appealing user interface and dashboarding environment.”

And so, the challenge for IT departments and ISVs alike is to find an efficient way to provide cost-effective analytics solutions that:

• Are robust enough to deliver self-service BI options to end users, anywhere.
• Provide a simple enough user interface to be accessible by all levels of users.
• Do not include prohibitive start-up expenses or support and maintenance costs.
• Provide a scalable, affordable way to serve up data and insights as your needs grow.

The Case for Buying vs. Building

Even if you have the skill sets and personnel to build a BI solution from scratch, you’ve got to ask yourself: is it cost-effective for you to do so? To find out, Nucleus Research recently surveyed companies who partnered with an outsourced BI solution versus “going it alone”—and we’re sharing the answers they discovered here with you today.

1. Would your IT staff deliver more ROI if they were freed up to work on more strategic activities than researching, developing and maintaining an in-house BI solution? “Previously, we gave our clients a set of reports, with limited functionality and very little capabilities – basically a flat file with data. That was all our team could support. By outsourcing an existing BI solution, we now provide much greater functionality and capabilities that allow our clients to have the insight and decision-making capabilities without us having to take on the costs of maintaining and supporting the solution.”

2. How do the costs for ongoing maintenance cut into your own efficiencies?
“We knew we’d have to have a dedicated team supporting this system if we did it on our own. We’d have one full-time resource just to maintain and support the system, which does not even include the costs related to research and development of a BI solution. The costs just did not make sense.”

3. How does a turnkey, cloud-based BI solution reduce costs for your company?
“We wanted to use a cloud BI solution to reduce the costs of the overall solution and the related infrastructure. It was equally important to have someone else deal with the maintenance and support of that system, and take it from our hands.”

If you’re in the business of providing data insight to your customers and would rather not become an actual BI software developer saddled with R&D and maintenance costs associated with building your own solution, then look to GoodData. With a scalable, cloud-based, fully-supported and embedded BI solution, you can do MORE than provide value to clients by making insight easily and seamlessly accessible. You’ll provide yourself with additional value by choosing a solution that’s wildly more cost-effective than building your own.