It’s holiday shopping season, and many of us will head downtown or to the mall to window-shop. (Even if we prefer to purchase online.) As human beings we’re naturally drawn to beautiful things, attractively displayed.
It’s shopping season for embedded analytics software, too. Don’t believe me? In its Embedded Business Intelligence Market Study (2014 Edition), Dresner Advisory Services reported that “a majority of our community of respondents indicate embedded BI is ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ and that it “falls into the top third of initiatives considered strategic to business intelligence.”
You have to look past the window dressing when shopping for embedded analytics tools. Sure, beautiful data visualizations are important. But for enterprises, it’s just as important – and probably more important – to have powerful, flexible technology underpinning those pretty pictures.
So, as smart shoppers, you need to ask potential vendors lots of questions. You need to understand how their offerings integrate into your overall development and deployment architectures. You need to make sure that visualizations and other graphics can seamlessly match your company’s existing look and feel. And because you want to grow, you need to be sure that a product can scale to meet your needs.
Actuate has collected a dozen important questions for providers of embedded analytics tools in the infographic below. Don’t let the colorful format fool you; these are tough questions that deserve concrete answers. Download the infographic as PDF and use it as a checklist when you talk with other vendors. (Dare we say it: Make a list, and check it twice.) And to see how Actuate answers these questions, download our free white paper, Top 12 Reasons to Integrate BIRT in Your Applications.
Happy shopping.
Holiday shopping image by David Porter.