Best Data Products - Your Easy Guide

Data Products: A Definition

Data products are the application and modeling of data to a business or organization and its stakeholders. They can help businesses or organizations understand data in order to gain insights, make predictions, generate revenue, optimize costs, mitigate risk, improve compliance, and enhance decision-making. The data they create may power products, or they might lead to the creation of more data products that get their value from the generated data.

So, data products are at the heart of data-driven organizations, because more data products mean more data. Two highly visible examples of data products are Google search and LinkedIn. Google Search is a data product that provides us with search information, but it also learns from our search behavior, and every time we interact with the service it gets better. LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature learns from your current social network and behavior on its website to predict recommended connections.

The Benefits

Why data products are so important for your organization?

Great data products are critical to ensure the most comprehensive, precise, and valuable benefits from your data. Deploying the right data products will enable confident decisions and are derived from insights based on the best and most thorough data available. Some of the key benefits are as follows:

Makes data and analytics accessible, visible and understandable to everyone
Mashes up huge volumes of data from multiple sources, both on-premises and on the Cloud
Transforms complex data into more and better insights, and actionable results
Accelerates time to insights, where possible in real-time or close to real-time

Improves decision-making, planning, productivity and efficiency
Improves data sharing and collaboration between internal and external stakeholders
Improves cost-effectiveness and boosts competitive advantage
Maximizes the value of your products and services
Enhances customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty

Data Product Types

Data products have proliferated with an increasing volume of sources, both on-premises, or in the cloud. They are instrumental in making data more accessible, more visible, and more actionable. Data products boost the accuracy and effectiveness of decision-making in organizations and are key drivers of organizational growth and success. It’s therefore important to consider the main types of products, and establish which of them are right for your current and future needs.

There are different types of data products based on what data they handle, and for what purposes. For example, data products such as raw data products, derived data products, algorithms, decision-support, and automated decision-making. However, for the purposes of selecting the best data products for you, it is simpler to consider what they do with data, in the following three simple ways:

Data-as-a-Service

These products provide data to your customers and create direct revenues through the personalization of data to your customers. Typical examples are stock market data or location-specific weather data updated in real-time.

Data-Enhanced Products

These products enhance other products, both physical and virtual, by providing data to improve their effectiveness and performance. For instance, analytics can be embedded into products to better understand users’ behavior so that the products can be further calibrated or updated to meet users’ needs. By improving products in this way, they enable businesses to change the price or quantity of the improved product, thereby adding value, driving up sales, and growing revenue.

Data as Insights

These products manage, organize, and analyze data in order to increase the understanding of data within your organization. Data can be used to improve the sales or quality of a product without exposing the data to the end-user. In these cases, data identifies ways to enhance operational, logistical, and other efficiencies that can save money and positively affect your bottom line.

Key Data Product Considerations

While companies and organizations share many features and requirements, each has its own specific characteristics and needs. So, when you’re considering which data products best meets your requirements, bear in mind the following considerations:

Are your data products comprehensive?

Data products support a wide range of formats. In addition to basic file types like Excel, delimited text files, XML, JSON, EBCDIC, and the like, ensure that they can handle other common formats like SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, and DB2. And it’s important to handle enterprise software like SAP, SAS, Marketo, and others, plus data from cloud services and the leading cloud-based data warehouses.

Are the data products of your choice future-proofed?

The amount of data you need to manage, and the number of connected devices generating data, is rapidly growing all the time, so it’s vital that your choice of data products can not only handle your current data but a massive increase in data that you can expect in the future.

Are they scalable?

As your organization grows and changes, you can scale the capability of data products. It’s important that the power and technology for scaling up to handle larger quantities and increasing varieties of data, without extra infrastructure.

Do they meet your organization’s needs as closely as possible?

Ideally, your choice of data products should precisely meet your requirements. So, make sure that the data products you deploy are built with customization in mind; are purpose-built for developers so they can reduce development time, and can embed analytics everywhere so that you can integrate analytics into your products and services.

Are they flexible and agile?

Data products should also be adept at handling other changes that your organization to meet changing demands quickly. From granular customization of functionality to adapting to new requirements and driving shorter times-to-insights, they should ensure performance regardless of the challenges ahead.

Are your data products capability user-friendly?

To maximize the value from data products should make data more accessible, comprehensible, and easily actionable. Plus, your preferred data products should enable AI throughout so that they learn from your users and data to solve problems intuitively.

What do analysts say about our data products?

See how the leading vendors of data products and analytics stack up in the most respected industry analyst reports:

Value delivered, early innovation, and customer success are what make us the leading Visionary in the Magic Quadrant.
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Sisense earned top rankings from customers for ease of use, ease of doing business with and quality of support.
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Forrester Wave Report Names Sisense a Leader

Leader for Enterprise BI for both on-prem and in the cloud. Recognized for complex data, innovation in augmented analytics, and breadth of use cases.
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“Overall Leader” for customer experience and credibility with high scores for value & integrity put us consistently above the rest.
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The value of the Sisense platform

Product teams, cloud data teams, and business analysts from the world’s leading companies and global enterprises use the power of Sisense to effortlessly combine complex data from a variety of sources and build analytics apps that deliver insights to everyone in the organization.

These power users who we call builders enable other business users from a wide range of functions. Sisense gives them the power to identify, analyze, and visualize the data that influence the course of your organization, with powerful decision-making capabilities that are potentially game-changing.

Power to the builders

The Sisense BI and analytics platform dramatically accelerates the time it takes to build, embed, and deploy intelligent analytics apps that unleash user creativity and engagement. Whether it’s interactive dashboards, self-service analytics, or white-labeled BI apps, Sisense delivers the industry’s lowest TCO at scale.

Insights for everyone

Sisense empowers your users to make decisions and challenge assumptions by equipping them with the insights they need, when and where they need them. We help everyone in your organization drive change through powerful AI and ML solutions that deliver BI with optimal impact.

Rated #1 in customer success by our customers

It’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it. It takes more than patented technology to make your business successful. You need the product to work in your network, with your requirements, under your constraints. And that’s when our customer-centric culture kicks in. We work with you on every installation, upgrade, and project to make sure you feel the value of your BI platform in your business.

Your Easy Guide to Data Products