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The global market for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) touched USD 158.2 billion in 2020. According to recent research reports, this number is expected to reach USD 307.3 billion by 2026.
The pandemic has also further catalyzed growth for this sector – pushing companies to adopt next-generation, cloud-based solutions to automate and streamline their operations. Modern enterprises are now opting for cloud-based solutions for ERP, CRM, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), quality control, and safety management. Traditionally, businesses used on-premise software from the likes of SAP and Oracle to streamline their day-to-day operations.
In addition to these massive business systems, business leaders are now turning to purpose-built SaaS products for all kinds of processes. There are SaaS tools available for sending invoices, managing subscription billing, automating customer service processes, email campaign management, social media management, etc. HR teams are using SaaS tools for onboarding employees, posting jobs, tracking employee vacations, and so on. According to some reports, there are over 11,000 SaaS companies that operate around the world.
Why is data crucial to delivering a better product experience?
The next frontier for SaaS and cloud-based companies is to become more data-driven. They want to help their users with cutting-edge dashboards and data visualization features to make sense of data residing within these apps.
While SaaS tools are designed to improve productivity, streamline operations and increase collaboration, users are now looking for more. They want to generate periodic reports from data stored in SaaS or cloud-based software.
These reports help business users and team leads in several ways:
- Automatically track and monitor key performance metrics
- Capture lagging indicators
- Measure metrics that matter and involve relevant stakeholders when metrics fall behind
- Communicate better, using data at the front and center of discussions
- Send reports to senior management on a regular basis
- Integrate data from the SaaS tool and combine with data from other sources, to present a unified view of several metrics
How a third-party embedded analytics solution can help SaaS companies
Most SaaS products are purpose-built to serve a niche. For instance, a SaaS product to automate customer support operations is designed to make life easy for customer service professionals. Product leaders, often, strive to understand the specific needs and wants of various user personas and build features and capabilities accordingly. But, these SaaS tools are not designed for data reporting. It requires expertise in data management, data transformation, data mashing, data wrangling, data modeling, etc.
In most cases, SaaS companies are better off using a trusted third-party embedded analytics solution for operational reporting and BI.
In this post, we highlight five key factors to consider while choosing the right embedded BI solution for your purpose:
Factor 1 – Pre-built reports and Ad-hoc Reporting capabilities
Business users want regular, pre-scheduled reports to be generated from the SaaS tool. Ideally, these reports are built once and automatically delivered to authorized users. Also, the embedded BI solution must support the easy generation of ad-hoc reports.
Factor 2 – Dashboards and Interactive Charts
Business users are now looking for SaaS tools that offer next-generation data visualization capabilities. In just a few clicks, they want to spot trends, monitor data, and track key performance metrics. They want mobile-ready dashboards, so they can track progress from anytime, anywhere.
Factor 3 – The third-party solution must support multi-tenancy
It is crucial that the embedded BI solution offers multi-tenancy capabilities, so it’s easy to manage various tenants who share the same infrastructure.
Factor 4 – Data Security
The safety and security of data residing in the SaaS app is crucial. Therefore, the embedded BI solution you choose must ensure data security rules can be defined and applied on user roles restricting the user from accessing certain data as per the policies.
Factor 5 – Automatic Scheduling of reports
Users are now expecting automating reports to be delivered as per a predefined schedule. It is important to identify a BI solution with this capability, before embedding it into your SaaS product.
It is also good to have an embedded BI solution that can connect easily with disparate data sources. It makes it easy to get a unified view of data from across operations/functions.
Also, Even as companies are moving to modern data analytics solutions, Excel continues to be one of the most powerful tools for analytics by an individual. Therefore, if your embedded BI solution offers easy integration with Excel, it can be a game-changer. With Orbit’s Embedded BI offering, real-time data from the app can be analyzed inside Excel using Orbit XLEdge plugin.
We believe Orbit Embedded BI is one of the best solutions for in-app operational or transactional reporting. Request a Demo
