What Makes Sense For Embedding Analytics: Buy or Build?
In this video, you’ll learn the pros and cons of building your embedded analytics solution.
Although building your own embedded analytics solution may look like a smart play, it’s usually not. Even if you have analytics expertise in house, which is often not the case. Sure, you’ll get something that meets your precise requirements. But then you have to devote lots of resources to maintaining it — forever. Total cost of ownership (TOC) includes a lot more than the initial build.
Buying embedded analytics from a domain expert can slash time to market and TOC. Unless you want to invest in developing and maintaining in-house embedding expertise, buying deserves serious consideration.
Transcript
When it comes to embedding analytics technology, one of the questions you're gonna have to face is should you build that technology yourself or should you buy an external technology. And another way of looking at this is time versus money.
Build a Custom Solution
So, if you're gonna build the technology yourself, the great benefit there is you'll end up with a very precise, custom fit solution. You know, you built it, so it's gonna meet your exact requirements. But, typically, this is gonna take more time and more budget. You've got to have product managers, you've got to have engineers focused on this area, and then you've got to face ongoing maintenance and enhancement. So, again, this needs to be part of the roadmap, and you've got to have product managers and engineers focused on this part of the product.
And as a result of that, you've got to have in-house expertise. You've got to have people who really understand the analytic domain in a lot of detail, and that may be a challenge for many organizations.
Buy Technology from Domain Experts
By contrast, if you're looking at buying the technology, there's a lot of great software packages out there which are built to be embedded. And ironically, this is gonna typically end up costing less. You know, you're paying licensing fees, but you're not having to pay those ongoing costs of engineers and product managers who are probably better off focusing on other [unintelligible] application.
The other great benefit of buying is time to market. You're not starting with a clean sheet here. You're starting off with a very mature, full featured analytic capability, which you're simply embedding. So, typically, this can go a lot faster, typically within one release cycle.
A great benefit is you don't have to be an expert in analytics. You can leave that to the software vendor where you're bringing in the technology. They're the experts, and you're simply embedding, the capabilities that they provide.
So, the bottom line of, buying the technologies is, in general, you're gonna end up with a more cost effective and actually a more compelling and competitive built in analytics capability provided by that specialist vendor.
