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Providing the right level ofanalytics self-service as atechnology provider
Where are you in your level of maturity as a SaaS provider?

Contents
Introduction

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Building data visualizations, reports, and dashboards in-house

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Considering off-the-shelf technologies

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Providing the right level of analytic self-service capabilities

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Enabling users to answer ad-hoc questions7

Adding advanced and predictive capabilities

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Summary

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Learn more

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About OpenText

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Connect with us

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Introduction
Success as a software vendor involves far more than getting a great idea for a
new application. In order to be competitive, vendors need to develop software thatmeets users’ requirements and is delivered in a timely, efficient way.
This is especially true with the Software as a Service (SaaS) channel. Delivering
services and information through a web portal involves less time, expense, andeffort than on-premises installation and maintenance. But delivering your services
through the cloud means business users expect the same visual appeal and intuitiveease of use that they get from consumer sites.
Meanwhile, they still want the most advanced analytics, dashboards, and reportson the operations your software automates, plus hands-on access to data fromevery source imaginable.
But if analytics, reporting, and data integration aren’t part of a vendor’s corecompetency, that can pose a dilemma: Take the time and effort to develop those inhouse, or work with another vendor to embed those capacities through off-the-shelfmodules? And what level of reporting and analytics do you need to offer, in order tosupport your application’s business purpose and meet customers’ expectations?
At OpenText, we see this issue as a journey of several stages. Where anapplication provider finds itself will depend on its level of maturity as a SaaS
provider. As it grows, it will generally work through the stages in this order:• Build basic reporting and analytics solutions in-house• Offer basic reporting and data visualization functions via off-the-shelftechnologies from other vendors• Add reporting and analytics that enable flexible user self-service• Add advanced and predictive analytics
Choosing the right approach for a software vendor’s current size and customer
demands can offer these benefits:• Speed time-to-market• Reduce cost associated with multiple implementations• Make their application successful by avoiding common pitfalls• Turn data into a revenue driver• Gain a competitive advantage

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Building data visualizations, reports, and dashboards in-house
Advantages• Perceived low cost and fasttime-to-market
Limitations• Costly to develop and maintain• Localized control• Slow response to rapidly evolving
user requirements and feedback• Diverts resources from SaaS’core competencies

In the early stages of growth, technology vendors develop a core competency
around building a particular application. However, as the user base expands,
the application provider soon hears that customers want them to add reports,
dashboards, and analytics, for more insight and actionable intelligence.
Often, a vendor's immediate reaction is to build those reporting and analytics features
in-house, because it seems the quickest, most resource-efficient way to go.
However, many software application providers underestimate both the impact ofpresenting better intelligence, as well as the effort required to deliver it. So theydecide to develop their own BI and reporting solution using Java, JavaScript, JSP, orother custom code along with reporting and data visualization libraries. This meansthat the in-house development team needs to build an entire framework to access
data, create reports and dashboards, and create all the capabilities to schedule, run,and view these reports.
As users become more sophisticated in their use of the application, they ask for
new reports and dashboards or make change requests for existing content and/or
the addition of new features. Since these applications have been developed using
Java or JSP code from the ground up, it is time-intensive to create additional
visualizations. New reports and dashboards can only be developed either by
the application provider’s engineering team, limiting the company’s growthprospects and diverting resources from its core competencies, or the customer's
IT department, taking up their own time and resources and lowering their overallsatisfaction with the application.
Either way, in-house development of reporting and analytics capacities turns out tobe slower and more expensive than a software vendor may have initially realized.

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Considering off-the-shelf technologies
Advantages• Better built-in reports and dashboards• Infrastructure to store and deliver
reports and dashboards
Limitations• Continuous development to add orchange reports and dashboards due
to changing requirements

When software application providers realize that developing reporting and datavisualization solutions in-house is ultimately too costly to maintain and places too muchstrain on their engineering resources, they often partner with a third-party businessintelligence vendor, embedding their modules for reporting, dashboards, and analytics.
By leveraging an off-the-shelf technology, software applications providers canprovide a much richer set of reports and dashboards. This offering increases theapplication’s overall value by providing robust enterprise-grade functionality to help
customers better understand their data and make informed business decisions.
However, while a robust platform will make it easier for IT teams to deliver
new reports and dashboards, it will not stem the requests for new designs ormodifications to existing ones, particularly around users' demands for self-service.
As users increase, so do their demands, in both amount and variety. Soon, theapplication development team finds it must devote much of its time and resources
to create and maintain new reports and dashboards to satisfy the broad spectrumof user needs. This is especially true for SaaS providers, whose customers areused to receiving frequent, flexible updates on similar schedules to their favorite
consumer apps.

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Providing the right level of analytic self-service capabilities
Advantages• Drive user satisfaction by empowering
them to personalize and answer theirown questions• Empower Microsoft® Excel® users towork in their favorite environment• More self-service for users means
fewer change requests• Maintain fewer reports anddashboards
Limitations• Power users cannot create ad-hoc
content from scratch

Simply embedding off-the-shelf analytics components into a business application isn't
enough, because a one-size-fits-all approach won't address all customer demands.
Technology providers must also define data governance and security for each user.
"Governance" means that each user, based on their defined role and level of security,needs to see the data to which they are entitled. And they need to be able toslice and dice the data and view it in ways that can help them create actionable
intelligence based on their particular business unit.
For example, the same basic report may be seen by multiple users, but a specificuser may want to see the data sorted or filtered differently to show only a subset.
Other users may want additional data elements or new computed elements. A way
out of this dilemma, which also increases the longevity of reporting content, is toequip users with interactive capabilities that allow them to sort or filter data or
create new computed columns or additional groupings on their own.
Meanwhile, some users prefer Microsoft® Excel® so strongly that they demand toexport data to Excel and perform their analysis there.
The best BI solution provides both the right level of self-service and supports
the needs for Excel devotees by delivering reports that not only preserve theformatting, but also the calculations used within the report, the charts, and the
PivotTables, thus facilitating further analysis of the data.
With their immediate visual impact, dashboards are a popular way to quickly gain
access to the most commonly used business metrics. Given that the businessmetrics will differ by business functions and roles, users will need the capability topersonalize their own dashboards by selecting appropriate visualizations or evencreating new ones.

Figure 1: An effective dashboard offers different data visualizations to help users
understand the patterns and relationships in their information.

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SaaS providers must also define data governance and security. Each user must beable to see the data to which they are entitled and that data must be accurate. They
must also be able to break it into smaller parts to help them create intelligence thatwill improve their business decisions. Each user must also have a tool that meets
their skill set but gives them the same level of self-service as any other user.

Enabling users to answer ad-hoc questions
As application and report usage spreads throughout customer organizations,more business users want to create their own reports, dashboards, and datavisualization gadgets against the application and be able to answer ad-hoc
questions (that is, questions that occur to them during a project, rather than prebuilt queries). Power users are often data-savvy but do not have the right skill set
to write specific queries, such as SQL. This means the application provider will haveto find a simple way for them to access application data, upload their own files, anddrop visuals directly onto their dashboards.
Most software application providers take one of three approaches that enable end
users to formulate ad-hoc questions.
1. The most typical solution is to create highly parameterized reports anddashboards.For example, users can change parameters, such as account names,
date ranges, or network ID to zoom in on the required information. While they
are not actually authoring a report or a dashboard, users do have a flexible
environment to build queries on a self-service basis without relying on IT resources
to build the report.
2. A second option is to integrate custom web-based design capabilities into an
application. This approach typically uses a wizard-like interface that starts witha template and guides the user through a series of steps to specify the data
source and formatting rules. Users can then create ad-hoc reports withoutswitching applications. In this scenario, an underlying repository is needed toallow business users to save different versions of their designs, as well as sharethem with other users.
3. A third option is to embed an out-of-the-box design environment that can be fully
branded and integrated into the application. This tool should have a drag anddrop-style interface to invite users to build their own reports that can be sharedwith others.

Figure 2: End users want the ability to build and personalize their own dashboards.
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However, all three approaches still face the same challenge: Most application
databases are not designed to facilitate analytics and reporting, and sometimes
applications require that all data access happens via an application layer. The
technology provider will need to address this data access problem in order tosimplify development of relevant content.
Regardless of the data access mechanism, the application will need to provide afriendly way for business users to construct queries on a self-service basis.

Adding advanced and predictive capabilities
Driven by computing power, cheap storage, the rapid development of the Internet ofThings, and the social and mobile revolution–there has been an explosive growth ofdigital information over the past decade. Technology providers are quickly discovering
the need to add an advanced analytic solution as part of their existing offering.
Advanced and predictive analytics is future-oriented and focuses on driving
business decisions, anticipating and optimizing outcomes, and predicting behaviors.
By capturing and analyzing historical data, businesses are able to make predictions
and influence outcomes.
When technology vendors add advanced and predictive analytic capabilities, they
empower their customers to uncover insights that:• Anticipate and prepare for emerging trends and market developments• Make proactive vs. reactive business decisions• Discover patterns and relationships that inform better engagement• Reduce risk and uncover fraud• Optimize IoT-driven solutions
Technology vendors that offer their customers advanced analytics gain acompetitive edge and have the option to offer this as a premium paid service.
The problem here, as with adding other features, is that these sophisticated BI
capacities may not be part of the vendor's core competency. In that case, thevendor may choose to embed analytics functions from a third party.
However, these extended functions often require processing millions of rows ofdata. If you are a SaaS vendor offering your solution via a web browser, you wantto make sure the partner whose functions you embed into your solution offers
reliable and secure data delivery and the scalability to handle Big Data.

Summary
As we’ve seen, application vendors are facing ever-growing demands for analytics
capacities, including visually appealing reports and dashboards that let users build
their own ad-hoc queries, without the need for constant IT support. Yet developing
these capacities in-house can entail more expense, development time, and support
burden than many application vendors are prepared for. This is especially true ifthey’re offering their products through the SaaS channel, where customers havehigh expectations for agility, ease of use, and frequent feature upgrades.
Embedding analytics and reporting features from a trusted third-party provider can
be a viable option for vendors that want a quick, resource-efficient way to boost
their own applications’ capacity with built-in business intelligence.

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However, embedding third-party modules is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Vendors need to consider their level of maturity as a SaaS provider, which willaffect the scale, complexity, and level of interactivity of the analytic features theypresent as part of their overall application offering.
Further, they need as a partner a business intelligence vendor that offers
powerful analytics and reporting functionality, with the same visual appeal andintuitive ease of use that consumer sites offer, plus robust scalability and security
protections for their end users’ data.
OpenText™ Analytics: Easy SaaS integration of world-class analytics and reporting
Consider the OpenText Analytics Suite, which offers white label integration thatenables you to seamlessly insert ad-hoc reports, personalized dashboards, andinsightful analytics into your SaaS applications. These are built on a feature of
OpenText Analytics Suite called OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting, a powerful
out-of-the-box data visualization platform and deployment server. Leverage
this high-performance visualization and reporting technology to quickly build BI
infrastructure components that serve up interactive, personalized content to users–
branded with your look and feel.
Features:• A powerful, secure, and embedded BI platform that scales to unlimited users
as your business grows• Easy-to-use data visualization tools that present real-time graphical summaries
of your information and ad-hoc reports• Fully interactive and intuitive applications with customized reports, animatedvisualizations, and analytical dashboards for real-time insights• Multi-tenancy for easy management of multiple tenants sharing thesame infrastructure• 100-percent uptime, including High Availability feature for cloud deployment
to support automated recovery• Near-linear scaling, plus elastic clustering• Flexible licensing for cloud deployment
The OpenText Analytics platform gives your customers’ IT department full
administrative and user management power to tailor interfaces and reports, butdoesn’t interfere with business users’ intuitive, self-service access to data.
Because it doesn’t rely on industry-specific or platform-specific technology, it’s
extremely flexible and can be incorporated quickly and easily into any SaaS productfor any platform, desktop, or mobile and includes the industry’s broadest set of APIs,
including JavaScript, IDAPI, ODA, Web Services, REST, HTML5, and Highcharts. This
lets you plug in a wide range of third-party visualization tools, data streams, and web
gadgets to enhance your presentation.
Adding new features to your applications, in order to meet customer expectations
and stay ahead of competitors, can feel like a rat race. But you can lower theeffort and risk required by partnering with OpenText, a 25-year veteran of thetechnology industry with a vast range of existing partnerships.
OpenText Analytics will help you stay one step ahead. If you’ve got the vision for
the next market-dominating app, we’ve got the OEM solution to make it a reality.
We offer a highly efficient way to take your applications to the next level withinteractive reporting and best-in-class embedded analytics.
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Learn more

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About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight throughmarket leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For
more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit: opentext.com.

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