Reveal moves Infragistics BI platform into embedded analytics
With the release of Reveal, an embedded business intelligence platform, longtime software vendor Infragistics is expanding its presence in the analytics space.
With the launch of Reveal on Tuesday, the Infragistics BI platform is making a concerted leap into embedded analytics.
Though known best for its user interface development tools and range of developer applications, Infragistics, which long provided some analytics capabilities to its customer base, expanded more aggressively into the business intelligence space after its acquisition of SouthLabs in 2012.
SouthLabs had been developing a dashboarding tool for Apple's iOS operating system, and in 2016 Infragistics, a 30-year-old company based in Cranbury, N.J., turned that into ReportPlus, a self-service BI and data visualization tool.
Reveal, available now, is the next progression in the Infragistics BI platform.
"We got a lot of good feedback about ReportPlus, but the primary feedback we received was that customers were looking for embedded analytics," said Jason Beres, senior vice president of developer tools at Infragistics.
Beres added that ReportPlus had some embedded BI capabilities, but Reveal is built from the start to be an embedded analytics engine.
According to Infragistics, by using Reveal, organizations will be able to embed analytics into their SaaS or on-premises applications, and those accessing their BI through the cloud will be able to use any public or private cloud service provider they choose.
A sample Infragistics dashboard shows the marketing efforts of a company over the course of a year.
"Every BI vendor talks about embedded analytics because it's a growing market with all the new SaaS vendors who see analytics as a requirement for doing business or a value-add they can charge for," said Wayne Eckerson, founder and principal consultant of Eckerson Group.
With Reveal, the Infragistics BI platform may just be able to stand out.
They offer developer tools for developers who want to embed using tools and frameworks they are already familiar with, not a BI tool designed for nondevelopers. That's where Infragistics may have an edge.
Wayne EckersonFounder and principal consultant, Eckerson Group
"They offer developer tools for developers who want to embed using tools and frameworks they are already familiar with, not a BI tool designed for nondevelopers," Eckerson said, adding, "That's where Infragistics may have an edge."
The Infragistics BI platform's pricing is something else that strikes Eckerson as unique.
Reveal is being made available for flat fees on three-year and one-year plans -- $90,000 upfront for three years or $40,000 per year for three years, or $50,000 for one year -- which eliminates the cost of a development team embedding an application into a workflow, as well as the per-user fees that can add up quickly for any enterprise of size.
"I like their pricing model -- [it's] very transparent and straightforward and doesn't punish you for unexpected activity, which is hard to predict in an embedded market focused on external customers," Eckerson said.
According to Beres, while operating in the same space as many of the leading analytics software vendors, the Infragistics BI platform has some basic differences.
Because Reveal is designed with embeds, it has what Beres calls an in-memory data source.
He also noted that Reveal doesn't have some of the dazzling visualization features certain leading BI vendors are offering in their BI platforms -- information cards that pop up when the mouse hovers over a word or phrase, for example.
The Infragistics BI platform is designed to do core analytics.
"When we're looking at the enterprise or the ISP what they're asking for is modern reporting with dashboards that people can drill down, do that foundational analytics, and then make decisions based on that," Beres said. "A lot of the new stuff, at the high end ... they're so far beyond what the average business user needs as far as just getting data to make better decisions."
