Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Embedded Analytics: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

The processes and technology of the analytics and data software industry play an instrumental role in enabling an enterprise’s business units and IT to optimize data in both tactical and strategic ways. To accomplish this, organizations must provide workers with technology that can access the data, generate and apply insights from analytics, communicate the results and support collaboration as needed.

ISG Research defines Embedded Analytics as the ability to incorporate analytic applications, or portions thereof, into other business applications and business processes. It includes application programming interfaces that interact with analytic applications, including metadata and provisioning. It also involves the ability to rebrand analytics components to match other organizational applications.

For many years, analytics providers offered large, monolithic applications that were difficult to embed in other applications. APIs for accessing and interacting with these applications were extremely limited. As overall application architectures evolved toward microservices, analytics providers followed suit and evolved the products into related services and components. This change made individual components more easily accessible and required software providers to create APIs between components. As the market penetration of analytics products plateaued, providers recognized the opportunity to publish the APIs to reach a larger user base via embedded analytics. Today, nearly all analytics providers have rich APIs and a strategy for embedding.

Analytics embedded in business processes and applications are more accessible to line-of-business workers, and analyses are easier to perform in part because the application collects and assembles data. Our research shows that data preparation can be the most time-consuming step in the analytical process, and embedded analytics can dramatically reduce or eliminate this step. Analysis is also easier to consume because there is no need to switch context between the business application and an analysis tool.

Perhaps more importantly, analytics embedded within applications can more easily lead to action. For instance, if an analysis suggests a change in pricing, the appropriate logic, if included, can make those changes. If an analysis identifies a marketing campaign for a specific customer segment, the technology can perform the segmentation and launch the. campaign. For these reasons, we expect that through 2026, more than two-thirds of line-of-business workers will have immediate access to cross-functional analytics embedded in activities and processes, helping make operational decision-making more efficient and effective.

This Buyers Guide focuses on the challenge of delivering analytics and business intelligence in the context of business processes and applications. These needs are substantial—more than one-half of organizations (53%) report that users of analytics tools cannot perform analyses without IT involvement. Our research on cloud-based analytics, predictive analytics, data preparation and big data analytics shows strong interest in embedded delivery of those capabilities. Analytics providers understand the need to deliver embedded analytics; most have been developing and enhancing APIs and other mechanisms to integrate analytics more tightly into business processes and applications. However, it can be challenging for analytics and business intelligence software providers to package and deliver the capabilities in a way that makes them easy to embed into other applications and processes. Providers have made significant strides to overcome these challenges because organizations recognize the importance of embedded analytics. Nearly three-quarters of participants in our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research consider embedded analytics important.

Software providers must offer tools for defining data models and accessing data from applications and other data sources. These tools will likely support a different audience than typical analytics tools. An application development team, for instance, would create the framework for line-of-business workers to perform analyses. In addition, the tools must provide mechanisms to integrate inputs to and outputs from the analytical processes with other applications. Embedded analytics also requires programmatic access to the management and administration functions to minimize installation and maintenance of the system for line-of-business personnel.

Enterprises are aware of the value of embedded analytics. The next step is to embrace it by determining the embedded analytics capabilities offered in currently deployed software and comparing those with what other providers offer. Evaluating embedded analytics also requires an assessment of the underlying analytics capabilities. Great APIs and software development kits can only do so much if the foundation of underlying analytics is weak. Consequently, this Buyers Guide combines a comparison of embedded analytics capabilities with core analytics capabilities to determine the provider’s overall rankings. Enterprises can then use this report to help guide purchasing decisions and conversations with providers about the roadmap for embedded analytics. The market continues to evolve, but organizations can realize value today that will improve analytics processes.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Embedded Analytics evaluates software providers and products in the three key areas of data, analytics and communications. It includes much of the criteria used in our Overall Analytics and Data Buyers Guide but emphasizes the capabilities that support integration and customization.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of embedded analytics as we define it: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cloud Software, Domo, GoodData, Google, IBM, Idera, Incorta, Infor, insightsoftware, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Sisense, Salesforce, ThoughtSpot and Zoho.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of embedded analytics software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating embedded analytics offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Embedded Analytics in 2024 finds Oracle first on the list, followed by Microsoft and SAP.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Oracle
• Microsoft
• Domo

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Oracle
• SAP
• IBM

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Oracle, which has achieved this rating in six of the seven categories.
• SAP and Microsoft in five categories.
• AWS, Domo, Google, IBM and Qlik in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle embedded analytics, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our embedded analytics blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.