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If there’s one thing that’s increased for everyone building and deploying analytics over the past few years, it’s complexity—more assets, more teams, more moving parts. Analytics has become mission-critical and with that a huge proliferation of dashboards, reports, data models, and dependencies. Analytic assets have grown exponentially for enterprises and for software companies who are embedding analytics increasingly pervasively in their apps.
More than ever distributed teams are all working on different parts of the analytics stack, and they all sit at the intersection of growing and changing data flows and data dependencies. It’s an emerging release control headache. Get it wrong, and it’s a recipe for broken analytics.
In this post, you’ll learn why strong source control and integration with your DevOps processes is increasingly crucial for analytics—and how we’re delivering it here at Sisense.
<h3>Versioning and release management analytics headaches set to grow.</h3>
Dashboard, reports, metrics, and mapping have become first-tier assets in release processes, and are now as critical to version, track, and control, as code assets have always been.
For example, without strong controls, versioning, and integrating with CI/CD processes, with the proliferation of analytics assets and dependencies, it’s too easy for a report to break or return incorrect results when a change is pushed to a data type in the underlying data model. Or when an update to a data warehouse schema is released, an analytic data model no longer maps to the updates. And with multiple analytics developers, things can get very painful very quickly if there’s no way to combine everyone’s contributions into one unified repository or see who contributed a given change (it’s one of the reasons internal analytics teams often try and avoid too much collaboration, for fear of breaking changes.)
Net-net, with so many teams developing analytics assets, and so many other changes happening across the data landscape, it’s easy for teams to get out of alignment―and that can mean a broken user experience and diminished trust in the accuracy (and value!) of data.
Whether you’re at a software company tasked with embedding analytics in your applications or sit within a data analytics team, ensuring strong version management and control around the analytics assets you create and manage is crucial to ensure you can efficiently scale, ensure quality, and have the visibility around changes to resolve issues when they occur quickly. Ultimately, it’s critical for everyone to work together as a team and have a strong integrated and collaborative process from development to test to production.
Achieving this means applying the same degree of release management, tracking, and change controls that has been used by DevOps and software developers for years and fully integrating your analytics development with the Source Control Systems that they use, like Git. As the world’s leading version control system, Git is the standard for managing and tracking revisions. Often, it’s used for managing tracking code changes, but it can be used with any file type or assets—like your dashboards and data models.
<h3>The ugly truth: Analytics technology was never designed for this.</h3>
Ultimately, the solution is to connect  your analytics deployment to a robust Source Control Management platform like Git. It’s the best way to trace easily, review, undo changes, review, manage branches, and control changes to your dashboards, reports, and data models, and ultimately keep release processes aligned and in sync across your environment―and teams.
<img class="alignright wp-image-735986 " src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Git-blog-icon1-300x199.png" alt="" width="277" height="192" />
But the reality is a lot of analytics technology hasn’t, much of it is still pre-DevOps and pre-Git, and simply doesn’t play well with what are now industry standard source control systems. In fact, many analytics tools started out as single-user, desktop software and were never designed for the large-scale, collaborative demands of the modern analytics landscape.
For example, some analytics tools include rudimentary and proprietary built-in version management, separate from Git. What happens is that teams end up not using them at all. And DevOps teams can’t integrate it with their SDLC and CI/CD processes and standard tooling. While other analytic tools provide basic Git integration just for the data model for example but don’t include it across all assets, such as dashboards and other content, risking some assets getting out of sync with the release cadence.  That’s a headache waiting to happen.
If you’re looking to connect all your analytics assets to Git for total integration with your CI/CD processes, it’s been virtually impossible. Until now.
<h3>Introducing total Git integration for Sisense Fusion</h3>
Our design goal for Git integration was simple: integrate version control natively, without imposing additional restrictions or simplifying capabilities for ‘novice’ users, so you can integrate the complete asset chain - Sisense data models, charts and dashboards - with your software development lifecycle, DevOps, and CI/CD processes. We want to make broken analytics a thing of the past.
<img class="wp-image-735987 alignleft" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Git-blog-icon2-300x293.png" alt="" width="240" height="235" />
With the new Sisense-Git integration, you can develop new capabilities, commit changes, submit PRs, and revert changes - exactly the same way you do with the rest of your software. Not to mention get complete observability over who changed what across all your Sisense assets. No matter where you sit in the analytics development, or overall release process, there are some key benefits:
For example, if your job is building dashboards you now get the ability to test individual changes and integrated releases more easily and fully in safe development and staging environments and can push to production when ready.

[caption id="attachment_735984" align="aligncenter" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-735984" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Git-blog-1.png" alt="Selecting project assets in Sisense Fusion" width="800" height="512" /> Illustration: Selecting project assets in Sisense Fusion[/caption]

And if you’re a release manager, you can now ensure that Sisense plugs into your automation and release process, and you can standardize processes across your environment.
Finally, for software developers, you can develop and embed analytics that are built in Sisense (not just in your code) while checking in updates and managing changes in Git, rather than using proprietary source control management and versioning.

[caption id="attachment_735985" align="aligncenter" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-735985" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Git-blog-2.png" alt="Managing sources, diffs and commits in Sisense Fusion" width="800" height="513" /> Illustration: Managing sources, diffs and commits in Sisense Fusion[/caption]

At Sisense, we think this new Git integration finally brings analytics into alignment with enterprise and software release processes, providing high velocity, manageable analytics development. I’m excited about how this will enable organizations to create more impactful data experiences for users.

Why strong source control and version management is now critical for analytics success

How to Meet the Demand for Analytics Across the Organization

<h2>Overview</h2>


The Grid® Report for Embedded Business Intelligence by G2 is published seasonally, and it complements G2’s comparison of the top business intelligence product vendors. The focus on feedback and reviews from users makes both reports highly trusted sources of information when comparing embedded business intelligence product vendors.
The report is based entirely on data sourced from product reviews shared by G2 users and data collated from online sources and social networks. It has been designed to provide technology buyers with an objective guide to help them quickly select the best products for their organizations and to give vendors, investors, and analysts benchmarks for product comparison and market trend analysis.
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735215 size-large" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Grid-1024x541.png" alt="Grid report showing various companies" width="1024" height="541" />


<figure class="wp-block-image size-large fancybox"></figure>


So, when a company gets a great rating in the <a href="https://www.g2.com/reports/grid-report-for-embedded-business-intelligence-summer-2022.embed?featured=sisense&amp;secure%5Bgated_consumer%5D=239733d9-ccba-4d6e-b09d-264ae8237b6b&amp;secure%5Btoken%5D=bfbd657bc617e1eff81979de2feb15737ba3edf60185ddff66055c40a79b4965&amp;utm_campaign=gate-1828640">G2 Grid® Report</a>, you know it’s their real-life customers — those companies relying on the technology to evolve the way they do business — that gave them the grade. That’s why here at Sisense, we’re delighted to have been identified as a leading embedded business intelligence vendor.
In this white paper, we’ll look at what some of these ratings mean and how they highlight critical factors when choosing your<a href="https://www.sisense.com/platform/embedded-analytics/"> embedded business intelligence</a> platform.


<h2>Satisfaction ratings</h2>


In this G2 Grid® Report, Sisense has been named the industry leader based on its high customer satisfaction ratings and large market presence. Sisense scored a satisfaction rating of 87%. This score is influenced by the following:
<ul>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Customer satisfaction with end-user-focused product attributes based on user reviews</li>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Customer satisfaction with administration-specific product attributes based on user reviews</li>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Overall customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) based on ratings by G2 users</li>
</ul>
In key criteria like quality of support, ease of use, ease of admin and ease of doing business with, Sisense meets or exceeds the industry benchmark. Sisense’s data visualization, dashboards and reports interface remain the highest-rated features, all exceeding industry benchmarks.
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735218 size-full" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Satisfaction-Ratings.png" alt="Satisfaction ratings" width="430" height="368" />
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735216 size-full" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Highest-Rated-Features.png" alt="satisfaction ratings" width="422" height="182" />


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<h2>Ease of use</h2>


In the industry leaders’ segment of the grid, Sisense scored highly for ease of use.
These ratings reinforce our focus on the customer experience. At Sisense, we are obsessed with creating and maintaining a seamless user experience. The benefits of business intelligence and analytics need to be accessible to as many users as possible, regardless of technical skills. That’s a big part of why we believe in infusing analytics everywhere: embedding self-service, actionable intelligence anywhere, via custom analytics experiences, helps drive more data-driven decision-making across the entire organization. In doing so, Sisense blurs the lines between where analytics starts and ends to empower everyone to independently and easily manage data, drill down into the analytics and act on the most critical insights. This delivers the best possible value from your organization’s embedded business intelligence, and ultimately better business outcomes.


<h2>Working together</h2>


The relationship between you and your BI and analytics platform provider is critical. Working closely together will ensure that your provider has a clear understanding of your analytics needs so that it can most precisely meet them. This relationship is key to helping you mine your data for the most valuable insights for your business. The right provider will take your needs and goals onboard to ensure you derive maximum benefit from embedding analytics. Plus, you need to be sure that you can work together as your business grows and your product develops.
Building strong customer relationships is a guiding principle for Sisense, and we are committed to being more than simply a product and service provider. We seek to become a valued partner to your organization as it grows, and this is reflected in our high ratings for ease of doing business with us and for quality of support.
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735219 size-full" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/working-together-g2-comparison-770x329-1.png" alt="Quality of support and ease of doing business" width="770" height="343" />


<figure class="wp-block-image size-full fancybox"></figure>


These are significant factors to consider when selecting an embedded business intelligence solution that will be crucial to your future success.
Rolling out any new technology within an organization is challenging: You need to onboard employees who might be resistant to change, ensure the system works properly, help teams master the functionality, and create a solid plan for using BI and analytics to help you achieve your goals.
At Sisense, our customer success managers and technical support team not only guide customers through the implementation and deployment stage, but they also work closely with them in the long term, finding solutions, suggesting best practices, and ensuring they always get the most out of the platform. Most customers go live in around two months (or less).
Customers tell us that they love our products, particularly because we make business intelligence and analytics accessible for everyone. Sisense makes it easy for non-technical people to answer deep analytics questions on their own, extending the value of our offering throughout the business.


<h2>Data handling capabilities</h2>


To maximize the value from BI and analytics, we aim to empower our customers to access, identify, and analyze Big Data from the widest variety of sources. We’re proud that we’ve maintained our high rating (84%) amongst the industry leaders, for “Big Data Services.”
<a href="https://www.sisense.com/product/analyze/technology/">Our technology</a> can handle any data sources, both live and in-memory, cloud and on-premises, with an easy-to-use interface. Sisense enables you to join and query massive data sets in seconds, giving you a BI platform that runs as fast and as reliably as a proprietary database, without the need to buy any additional tools or invest in huge hardware infrastructure.
We offer a balanced ratio of cloud and on-premises implementation, which demonstrates the true platform-agnostic nature of Sisense and its flexibility when working with all data sources. This is what you should demand from a leading vendor of hybrid BI and analytics.
Sisense’s unique, high-performance features make blending, preparing and building powerful data models simple, expediting the speed at which data is gathered and queried, and enhancing ease of operation and performance.
You can connect to any database or data warehouse, both cloud and on-premises. <a href="https://www.sisense.com/data-connectors/">Built-in connectors</a> to dozens of data sources — including AWS, Snowflake, MongoDB, Google BigQuery, MySQL, PostgreSQL — make it fast and easy to turn terabytes of raw data into <a href="https://www.sisense.com/glossary/visual-data-analysis/">visual data analysis</a>. See all your data in one place and find correlations between disparate datasets or external sources to uncover new patterns and powerful insights.


<h2>Data visualization, dashboards and reports</h2>


Embedded business intelligence needs to be clearly presented for a seamless analytics experience so that teams can derive game-changing insights from their data in the most digestible way possible. Sharp data visualization is a key part of delivering easy-to-understand analytics.
In line with Sisense’s obsession with optimizing users’ experience and building unique and transformative data experiences, we achieved high ratings for data visualization, dashboards, and our reports interface amongst the four leaders in the grid. Our data visualization capabilities deliver easily comprehensible charts and graphs and easy-to-use dashboards.


<figure class="wp-block-image size-full fancybox"></figure>
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735214 size-full" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/data-viz-dashboards-interface-inline-770x585-1.png" alt="Chart showing dashboard of various companies" width="770" height="575" />


Dashboards are another critical consideration for organizations choosing an embedded BI solution, because the easier they make working with data, the better the user experience, and the greater the impact on your organization. That Sisense dashboards received top ratings among the leading vendors can be attributed to the Sisense platform’s robust back end, which provides a strong and stable foundation on which to model data, investigate datasets, and ensure security. The result is dashboards that are tailored to your requirements, interactive, and easy to understand and act upon by all users, regardless of data and technical maturity. 
Sisense undertakes extensive data preparation so that both users and your customers get the dashboards that meet their needs, with the appropriate levels of access to the data you want them to see. Similarly, for ease of use and understanding, a clear reporting interface is another important factor for which Sisense scores highly. The combination of these elements provides true self-service analytics and an intuitive data experience for all. 


<h2>Customization</h2>


We’ve already covered how important it is to provide dashboards that meet users’ and customers’ needs. Achieving this requires advanced customization capabilities, and Sisense’s ability to deliver this is reflected in our 85% rating for customization.
<a href="https://www.sisense.com/platform/embedded-analytics/">Sisense Fusion</a> offers an API-first cloud native platform that allows for complete customization, regardless of tech stack. Developers love Sisense because it enables them to build their own data product on top of an extremely powerful backbone. Consequently, Sisense’s capabilities can be easily integrated into existing workflows and applications such as <a href="https://www.sisense.com/platform/infusion-apps/">Slack and Salesforce</a>, creating a seamless experience where analytics resembles the everyday experience and users and customers are guided to the right insights and actions, at the right time. By taking advantage of the following 3 Sisense features, organizations can deliver robust embedded analytics fast, and with the flexibility to customize, manage and scale their solution: 
<ul>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Extensibility: Sisense is a fully and easily extensible single-stack BI solution with support for a wide variety of add-ons, plugins, libraries, and APIs (including REST API, JavaScript, and D3). </li>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Embeddability: Sisense allows product teams to embed dashboards and widgets anywhere with iFrames and JavaScript based Embed SDK and Sisense.JS libraries, Sisense’s custom JavaScript library for embedding widgets, to deliver unique data experiences where users could even take actions directly from the dashboard, based on the insights presented to them</li>
	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Customization: Sisense’s platform can be “white-labeled” and modified to suit your branding, ensuring a consistent look and feel. By providing a branded experience, you’ll create strong differentiators and drive product adoption.</li>
</ul>
Sisense’s API enables you to integrate many other systems and create new capabilities, enhanced by customization. The <a href="https://sisense.dev/">Sisense API</a> is particularly notable for its ease of use and programmatic access to extensive components of our solution. Every element in Sisense is designed to be accessed and modified via extensively documented JavaScript and REST API. 


<h2>Product direction</h2>


Mindful of all of these criteria, G2 asked users whether they feel each product is going in the right direction. Sisense scores highly with a 90% rating.This affirms Sisense’s commitment to taking analytics to the next level and going beyond standard BI dashboards with infused analytics. Infused analytics future-proofs and simplifies the user experience by integrating intelligence-driven insights, in-workflow alerting and prescriptive actions into everyday workflows and applications. With capabilities such as <a href="https://documentation.sisense.com/docs/overview-sisense-labs">BloX</a> and <a href="https://www.sisense.com/platform/infusion-apps/">Infusion Apps</a>, Sisense creates AI-powered and analytics-driven experiences, closing the loop between insight and action. By delivering compelling and actionable insights to all, Sisense democratizes data for everyone, enabling organizations to make better business decisions, reduce decision fatigue, and improve customer experiences.
<img class="alignnone wp-image-735217 size-full" src="https://sisense.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/product-direction-g2-comparison-770x195-1.png" alt="Chart showing companies going in the right direction" width="770" height="196" />


<h2>Final thoughts</h2>


G2’s Grid® Report for Embedded Business Intelligence usefully highlights the key factors to examine when considering which business intelligence and embedded analytics platform to choose for your organization.
Importantly, before making this move, you must be confident that your chosen provider can most completely meet your requirements and is committed to a meaningful working relationship with your organization. Your BI and analytics platform provider should become a partner rather than just a service provider, willing to innovate and scale with you as your products and services evolve, as your organization grows, and as your needs change.
That’s why it’s vital to undertake a full proof of concept (POC) process with any vendor with whom you’re thinking of working. Ask to use your own data instead of sample data to see how accurately and quickly embedded BI can enhance your analytics, improve data visualization tools, and benefit your organization.
Want to try out Sisense embedded BI for yourself?


<a class="action-btn " href="https://www.sisense.com/get/free-trial/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Start free trial</a>

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