For once, your CEO and CIO agree on something: Your company needs to embed analytics into its applications. You’ve been tasked with researching which platform is best for you, and you probably have two items on your to-do list: Learn from an industry expert who thoroughly studies the many different embedded analytics platforms, and hear from a company that has successfully embedded analytics into its software.
You can do both on January 22 by attending Embedded BI Market Study with Howard Dresner, a free webinar sponsored by Actuate.
Dresner, you probably know, is Chief Research Officer of Dresner Advisory Services, a respected technology analyst firm. Dresner (@howarddresner) coined the term “business intelligence” in 1989 and has studied the market drivers, technologies, and companies associated with BI and analytics ever since. It’s safe to say that nobody knows the sector better.
In this webinar, Dresner will highlight the results of his recent Wisdom of Crowds report, the Embedded Business Intelligence Market Study, published in October 2014. Dresner’s study taps the expertise of some 2,500 organizations that use BI tools, focusing specifically on their efforts to embed analytics in other applications. In the webinar, Dresner will cover three main subjects:
- User intentions for – and perceptions of – embedded analytics, segmented by industry, types of users, architecture and vendor
- Architecture needs and priorities (such as web services, HTML/iFrame and Javascript API) for embedding, as identified by technologists who implement embedded analytics
- Ratings of 24 embedded BI vendors, based on both the architecture and features the individual vendors offer, and the reasons Actuate garnered the top ranking
To add the user’s perspective, Dresner will then give the floor to Kevin Larnach, Executive Vice President of Operations at Elcom. Larnach will explain how Elcom embeds Actuate’s reporting solution in PECOS, its cloud-based e-procurement solution. Embedded analytics enables users of PECOS – a user base 120,000 strong, in more than 200 organizations, managing nearly $20 billion in total procurement spending annually – to access standard reports, slice and dice data for analysis, create custom reports and presentations of the data, and export transaction history to many different formats, all without IT expertise. As this diagram shows, PECOS touches all aspects of the procurement process.
PECOS users include the Scottish Government (including health services, universities and colleges, and government departments), several health services groups in Britain, the Northern Ireland Assembly, several school districts in the United States, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and many other organizations and companies. Elcom has identified over a billion dollars in audited savings that its customers have accrued thanks to embedded analytics – more than $500 million in the healthcare sector alone. Elcom’s application is truly an embedded analytics success story.
The embedded analytics capability in PECOS, delivered with Actuate technology, is an important competitive differentiator for Elcom. Its competitors’ products either have limited fixed reporting, or don’t offer any standard reporting at all. Those competitors “are scrambling to adopt a flexible embedded approach such as the one enjoyed by PECOS users,” Elcom says.
You’re sure to have questions for Dresner and Larnach, so the webinar will include a Q&A session. (An Actuate technical expert will also be on hand if you have specific questions about our embedded analytics capabilities.) The webinar will be accompanied by live Tweets using the hashtag #embeddedanalytics. Register today.