Tomer Lapid Every company is a data company. Insights Everywhere explores the ways companies are evolving to include analytics in their products as a market differentiator and revenue driver.
The key to success for apps of all kinds is stickiness, or getting users to, well, use your app regularly. The stickiest business applications are those that can be seamlessly embedded into the toolkit of your target audience’s daily work environment. Analytic apps are applications that can be bidirectionally embedded, rebranded, and integrated into everyday workflows, connecting employees and customers with data and insights to help them make smarter decisions.
When you’re evaluating a tool to enrich your core product or service, certain features are de rigueur: security, governance, compliance, etc. However, beyond these nuts-and-bolts elements, you also need to consider features that impact how your brand presents itself to users.
The power of branding
Brand-related features may even be the most important criteria when choosing a platform like Sisense to enhance your analytic app. Making sure your analytic app matches your brand’s look and feel is vital to ensuring that the application enjoys the full trust of the user. This includes the app’s user interface, colors, and fonts, but more importantly, you need to drive home the idea that data is integral to your organization. Your data (and any analytics presented to internal or external users) is one of your most important assets, and how these insights are displayed impacts your integrity.
Making data-based decisions is becoming increasingly important to organizations of all kinds. Savvy companies are finding ways to infuse insights into their workers’ daily tasks, allowing them to seamlessly make decisions within a business application. Additionally, these same companies are integrating insights and analytics into their customer-facing products to increase stickiness and even drive new revenue.
Wherever you’re putting data and insights, it’s imperative that any analytics presented to decision-makers be displayed within your brand’s guidelines. In short, your data and analytics must look and feel like they are coming from you.
For this reason, the Sisense product team requires every component built with APIs to keep this integration of data and analytics into other applications in mind. These APIs empower developers to tap into any Sisense interface or functionality and enhance, rebrand, or integrate it into the brand’s own analytic apps and off-the-shelf business systems.
Custom analytics with the Linux Pivot API
The newly released Linux Pivot encompasses a new set of APIs, allowing brands to customize the look and feel of, transform the data in, or change the structure of pivot tables to fit their unique needs.
Developers are motivated to extend and enhance their software using the functionality that standard and supported APIs (like the JavaScript APIs) offered over the pivot table. Using these APIs, developers can ensure that their custom solutions are backward compatible with every version upgrade and count on the vendor to announce breaking changes well in advance for them to mitigate issues. Their software becomes a fully functioning extension of the Sisense Pivot Table, never a hack.
To jump-start the adoption of the new Pivot Table APIs and offer cloud-native customers a list of reusable extensions, Sisense partnered with Paldi Solutions. The joint project took only a few weeks and some well-planned lines of code. Paldi’s team posted several extensions in the Sisense Plugins forum, including adding visual indicators to cells, checkboxes as interactive filters, and presenting sparklines to accompany the data (plus several other features).
Ravid Paldi, CEO of Paldi Solutions, puts it this way: “Two especially interesting features are the new ‘transformPivot()’ function with a very convenient cell selector for cells you wish to manipulate, and the ability to inject React components as your cell’s content. Cool stuff!”
For example, many of our customers in the retail industry present images of their products that align with each product’s key performance indicators inside an analytic app. These are presented in pivot tables; each image is clickable and allows the marketing manager to easily jump into their e-commerce campaign management tool or the product page on their Content Management System.
Taking our example a few steps further, let’s assume that inside the pivot table you have the forecast sales for each product, along with the allocated marketing budget. Using Sisense’s AI capabilities such as Forecast and AI Trends, the marketing manager can adjust the campaign budget within the analytic app to achieve the greatest return. It’s a fully integrated workflow that makes the marketing manager’s job easier and more productive.
Empowering with plugins
These add-ons extending the power of pivot tables are only a few of the numerous solutions customers, partners, and Sisensers post to the Plugins forum. As an open platform, Sisense offers an abundance of APIs, both REST and JavaScript, to embed, rebrand, extend, and customize analytic apps.
Whatever your company’s core product or service is, infusing data and analytics throughout will make it stickier, deliver more value to internal and external users, and can even help drive revenue from your data. Using a platform like Sisense, with an emphasis on flexible, powerful APIs (versus building your analytics from scratch internally), can be a game-changer when it comes to simplifying your analytics deployment. Analytics are the future of every industry, so choose a partner that’s as committed to your success as you are.
Tomer Lapid is a Product Manager for Sisense analytics and reporting. He brings 20 years of experience in a variety of R&D, customer-facing, leadership, and product management roles that he combines into one superpower: problem-solving!