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When you’re thinking about sharing analytics through an embedded solution, evaluating tools can be a complicated process. Breaking down the decision into four distinct areas can help:
- Build versus buy
- Time to market
- Level of customization you want to provide
- Simple ROI calculations.
The most important question when you’re thinking about embedding is, “Should I do this myself?” As we all know, you really can build anything yourself — the tradeoff is always time and effort. In the same way that most companies are not building your email server, it may not make sense to build a product to embed data out to your customers.
It’s really about deciding where your competitive advantage is as a company, and then focusing your resources on those tasks. If you’re going to build in-house, the resources to consider are people and time. As with most engineering, the work supporting embedded analytics is never done. Components break, and the product needs to evolve over time. Deferring and avoiding all this ongoing cost is the main advantage of outsourcing.
Depending on your business, delivering data may be your entire product. In those cases, it probably makes sense to build internally, creating a very customized experience. In other cases, it may simply be replacing a reporting function, or trying to supplement some other piece of information, or just trying to make a marketplace more liquid. In those cases, you probably want a more focused experience and building just wouldn’t make sense.
One of the big advantages that you see with buying over building is that the time to market can be much faster. If you’re going to embed through a tool, often times you can get in front of customers in weeks or even days. Furthermore, if you ultimately decide to build a data product on your own, go test different embedded analytics solutions where you can iterate quickly and understand what you want to deliver without going it alone.
The next important point to consider is customization. Obviously when you build internally, the feel can be completely custom to your own product. With any embedded solution there will be limitation. Trying to scope out exactly what the experience that you’re trying to accomplish is important when you’re starting, because it’s going to heavily influence the decisions you make in terms of purchasing.
Wrapping it all together, the real decision that you have to make is, “What is the amount of investment I’m willing to put into bringing data out, and what am I actually getting for that investment?”