The Future of Embedded BI: Customization Without the Overhead

The future of embedded BI - TL;DR

Modern embedded business intelligence (BI) platforms allow you to deliver deep, custom-tailored analytics without the crippling overhead. It's built on three pillars:

• White-label analytics: For a branded, native experience that boosts user engagement.
  
  
• Low-code functionality: To empower and free up teams to focus on core innovation.
  
  
• Flexible deployment: To meet diverse security and architectural needs of a wider range of customers.
  
  

Ready to build a more valuable product with smarter analytics? Book a Yellowfin demo today.

Building a great software product is a lot like creating your perfect video game. You could code it from scratch, or you can use a powerful, pre-built engine like Unreal and focus on the fun parts: the story, the characters, and unique features that make your game a hit.

For product managers, it’s the same crossroads when adding analytics to your product. You're pressured to deliver something bespoke and useful, but probably don't want to compromise by adding a clunky dashboard to your app experience, or spend months building it from scratch.

It's the ultimate "build or buy analytics" headache, and frankly, it’s a false choice. The future of embedded BI isn’t about sacrificing quality to save time, but getting the best of both worlds, thanks to three core capabilities: white-labeling, low-code, and flexible deployment.

How can I deliver a branded analytics experience?

Investing in white-label analytics goes far beyond slapping your logo on a dashboard. It’s about making analytics feel like a native, organic part of your app, like your team built it themselves.

White-labeling allows everything from the color scheme and fonts to the UI elements and navigation to be customized, allowing your team to align your analytics tool perfectly with your existing user experience and brand identity.

Being able to personalize your analytics integration means users won't feel like they're using a different platform when searching for data or insights, and ensures they spend more time using your software when they require it. 

Some embedded analytics solutions offer more white-labeling capability than others, making research essential. For instance, Power BI Embedded offers full embedding, but lacks deeper re-styling options (every report displays the Power BI logo and it cannot be removed).

Yellowfin, in comparison, offers several options that make it indistinguishable from your product. For example, Abrigo white-labeled Yellowfin to add more visually engaging and interactive reports for its financial clients, leveraging our out-of-the-box charting and design tools to match its existing product’s look and feel (colors, logos, etc) to deliver a seamless user experience.

Read the full case study: How Abrigo empowers clients with Yellowfin’s automated data discovery

How can low-code analytics accelerate my product roadmap?

Let's be honest, your developers are likely already stretched thin. This second trend is all about freeing up their time by empowering more of your team to build with data. 

In practice, low-code analytics means swapping a command line for a visual-based environment. This allows for the creation of applications with little to no programming - no more writing code like SQL, Python, or R - and instead giving you intuitive tools to build dashboards.

With a low-code BI solution, you can drag and drop a chart onto a canvas, point and click to connect to a new data source, or define an interactive filter with a few selections. This shifts the focus from the technical mechanics of building to the strategic design of the user experience.

Yellowfin’s low-code/no-code approach is core to our white-labeling capability. Our drag-and-drop interface allows you to create sophisticated dashboards, reports, and data visualizations in hours instead of weeks - drastically shortening time to value and accelerating your product roadmap.

How can flexible deployment help me reach more customers?

The final piece of the puzzle is recognizing that one size doesn't fit all. Flexible deployment means your embedded BI solution can live wherever your customers need it to.  

Legacy embedded BI vendors often force you into a "vendor lock-in" scenario with a proprietary cloud, which can be a major problem if your product users have strict data security or compliance requirements.

A modern, flexible solution, on the other hand, is built on an open architecture that allows for true multi-tenant deployment freedom. This means you can deploy the solution in a public cloud, a private cloud, or as a web-based app. 

This platform agnosticism is a key differentiator, as it allows you to serve a much broader market without being tied to a single vendor's proprietary infrastructure, databases, design tools, or programming languages. 

Download our whitepaper: Why Open Architectures Matter in BI

The new advantage: Customization without the compromise

So, what do these three embedded BI trends - white-labeling, low-code, and flexible deployment - actually do for you and your team? 

• Accelerated roadmap: Get your engineering team off the development treadmill and back to focusing on core product innovation.
  
  
• Customer indispensability: Make your application unmissable with a seamless, native-feeling experience that keeps users engaged.
  
  
• New revenue streams: Unlock new opportunities by monetizing embedded analytics as a premium, value-add feature.
  
  

Ultimately, the future of embedded BI means finally getting off that development treadmill to get a ready-made, fully customizable analytics module for your product without traditional overhead. 

And that is exactly what Yellowfin provides for your product team with our embedded BI suite. 

Is it time to upgrade your product?

Skip the painful overhead and jump straight to providing in-app analytics that can be truly made to look and feel like your own app, with all the benefits of the embedded BI model.