Embedding Indicee Dashboards & Reports
Quickly add Professional Reports and BI Dashboards to your App
One of the most common uses of the Indicee Platform API is to provide developers with the ability to embed world class analytics into their application and provide their customers with reporting and dashboards.
There has traditionally been three choices for embedding reporting and analytics into an application:
- Expensive enterprise BI: These vendors require extremely large up-front financial commitments and a high degree of customization of their product to embed it into your application. For online services and cloud or SaaS applications there is an excessive amount of developer effort required to implement and manage it over time.
- Open Source BI: The BI software is generally free to use. The cost of implementation and ongoing maintenance is very similar in scope to bringing in an enterprise BI Platform.
- Build your own BI: While possibly the most expensive of the three options in the long term, this is still a common solution because of the large amounts of time and effort required to make both Open Source and Enterprise BI Platforms work for today’s online applications.
Cloud BI: Quickly Embedding Reporting & Analytics
Before the emergence of real Cloud BI solutions, the options above all had three things in common:
- They all take a long time to implement and roll out to your customers.
- They all have a high cost of initial implementation and of ownership over time.
- They result in inflexible solutions that cannot easily adapt to change to business requirements, and that are disruptive or extremely costly to modify.
Embedding Indicee’s Cloud based BI Platform is simply a matter of using the Indicee Application and API to create the BI Model and embed the reports and dashboards right into your application.
No Data Warehouse to Manage
One of the biggest issues with BI Platforms over time is the complexity involved in managing the data wharehouse. As an application developer, you can spend time on your application, not on managing ours.
No Open Source Codebase to Embed, Maintain and Update
Open Source BI projects have gained traction with ISVs and online application developers because they promise to reduce some of the expense of enterprise BI packages. While this is true as it relates to the software license fees, the cost of integrating, customizing and maintaining an Open Source codebase is still significant. The emergence of Cloud BI Platforms like Indicee allows you to integrate at the API level and leave the rest to us.
Use Our Visualizations or Use Your Own
Indicee is a complete BI Platform. The API allows you to embed complete end user reports and dashboards generated by Indicee. Should you already have a visualization library or tool you can also retrieve the report datasets from the Indicee API and feed them to an alternate visualization solution.
Allocadia and Indicee – An Embedded Reporting Example
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Allocadia produces a cloud-based application that helps large marketing departments manage their budgets. Their customers needed to be able to generate and share reports and dashboards based on the budgeting data they create in the Allocadia application.
Allocadia had 3 key needs in mind when they started looking for a reporting and dashboarding solution for their application:
- Time to Value: They needed a solution they could roll out quickly to their customers. They weren’t looking for a 6 month or even a 3 month project.
- Customer user experience: The chosen solution would be a key interaction point between Allocadia and their customers. They wanted both a high quality user experience and a high degree of configuration for the types of data and reports they would present to the user.
- Cost of Ownership: They did not want to own a BI solution they would have to host themselves and manage over time.
Using Indicee, Allocadia was able to create a “BI Model” that represented their data and create a number of reports and dashboards that gave their customers the answers they were looking for.
Using the Indicee API they were able to automatically synchronize their data with Indicee and retrieve the reports and dashboard to be displayed within their application. From start to finish, the creation of the BI Model and the integration with their application took less than 1 month.
