ThoughtSpot adds analytics app templates, more automation
New capabilities included in the vendor's latest platform update include prebuilt applications, tools that automate insight delivery and a series of integrations with partners.
The new capabilities were revealed during Beyond 2022. It's the vendor's first in-person user conference since November 2019, after it held virtual user conferences the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., last updated its platform -- called the Modern Analytics Cloud -- in November 2021.
After historically targeting an audience of business users and spending much of the previous year rebuilding its platform to make it cloud-first, the vendor unveiled Data Workspace. The new release is an environment for data analysts, engineers and developers that enables them to build and operationalize interactive, real-time analytics assets.
ThoughtSpot's latest Modern Analytics Cloud update is not aimed at a particular persona, but at trying to give every employee within an organization the tools to work with data, according to the vendor.
Meanwhile, Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research, noted that the vendor's latest update, along with its embrace of the cloud and the addition of modern capabilities like embedded analytics, show that ThoughtSpot's platform is competitive with those of other analytics vendors.
"ThoughtSpot has changed its delivery model in recent years to embrace rapid cloud deployment, and now it's amping up integrations, embedding and automation options, while also opening up new subscription models," Henschen said. "You can't fault ThoughtSpot for lack of effort."
If ThoughtSpot has a problem, however, it's that many larger vendors have also become cloud-first and added many of those same capabilities, Henschen said.
"The company is up against the … stepped-up efforts by larger, incumbent vendors to make insights more actionable and broadly accessible in the context of day-to-day work," he said.
New capabilities
ThoughtSpot first introduced SpotApps in November 2021. SpotApps are prebuilt analytics applications for specific third-party workplace applications that enable customers to quickly deploy the analytics applications with a few clicks and derive value from the data collected by their workplace applications.
Initial SpotApps included applications for HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Snowflake.
New SpotApps launched Tuesday include applications for Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Analytics, Atlassian's Jira and Okta.
In addition to the introduction of new SpotApps, the vendor unveiled ThoughtSpot Sync and Monitor to add automation capabilities.
Sync enables users to automatically trigger actions in applications and services through application program interfaces, while Monitor automatically alerts users to changes in their key performance indicators as they happen.
I'm most intrigued by the SpotApp, Sync and Monitor announcements.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
"I'm most intrigued by the SpotApp, Sync and Monitor announcements," Henschen said. "The SpotApps provide more ways to accelerate time to value, Sync is about using analytics to trigger automated actions via APIs, and Monitor is about automating actions and the delivery of insights -- a real-time push model rather than requiring busy people to actively look out for and discover important changes."
Meanwhile, Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy, noted the importance of new integrations and connectors with ThoughtSpot partners.
Included in the latest Modern Analytics Cloud update are:
integrations with AWS Redshift Serverless to run on AWS without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters, Snowflake Data Marketplace to derive insights from third-party data in Snowflake, and Databricks to give the data lakehouse vendor's users the ability to launch a free trial of ThoughtSpot from the Databricks console;
connectors to data lakehouse vendor Dremio and data lake query vendor Starburst so users can take advantage of different architectures, including data mesh and data lakes; and
an integration with data transformation vendor Dbt Labs so engineers can translate dbt models to ThoughtSpot Modeling Language (TML) and model data more easily.
"What is most significant here is the focus on partner integrations," Farmer said. "That takes a lot of commitment and work, not only from engineering but from partner teams and marketing, as well as the work needed to get support and sales up to speed."
"Some of these integrations are lightweight connectors that more or less check a box for compatibility, but others involve significant engineering and enable very partner-specific architectures or solutions -- note the integrations with Matillion and Dbt Labs, particularly," Farmer continued.
In addition to new application templates, automation capabilities and added integrations, ThoughtSpot's Modern Analytics Cloud update includes:
the launch of CodeSpot, a searchable library of open source ThoughtSpot blocks, code samples and best practices that developers can use to speed the process of developing applications and embedding analytics;
third-party data blocks built with TML that enable customers to use external data to enrich their own data;
extract, load and transform (ELT) templates built to work with ThoughtSpot's SpotApps and ELT vendor Matillion so joint customers can quickly launch jobs between ThoughtSpot and cloud data warehouses using Matillion; and
the introduction of Bring Your Own Charts to enable users to import visualizations from JavaScript or D3 libraries into ThoughtSpot.
"ThoughtSpot is on top of key market dynamics," Henschen said. "It's stepping up integrations with hot vendors including AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, Matillion and Dbt Labs, and its CodeSpot and SpotApps announcements are all about accelerating time to value," Henschen said. "The challenge is that the leading BI/analytics incumbents are also heading in the same direction."
Therefore, in order to attract new customers rather than just serve the needs of existing customers, differentiation is key for ThoughtSpot. This is how it was when the vendor was a startup and was among the early adopters of augmented analytics capabilities -- such as natural language query -- that have now become more standard.
"Would-be customers will want evidence that ThoughtSpot is that much better at making insights accessible and actionable in a cost-effective way," Henschen added.
Similarly, Farmer said that now that other vendors are adding some of the same capabilities that differentiated ThoughtSpot early on, the company needs to find new ways of competing with established vendors. And the capabilities it continues to add through product development and recently its first two acquisitions will help.
"I think we'll see ThoughtSpot gaining some more attention and success now that the initial hype is over," he said. "The next wave for them will be more realistically positioned and more realistically gauged by the industry."
A ThoughtSpot Monitor dashboard automatically explains an organization's change in sales.
New editions
In addition to adding new capabilities, ThoughtSpot unveiled three new editions of its Modern Analytics Cloud aimed at enabling small businesses and individuals to use the vendor's platform in addition to the enterprises the vendor has historically served.
All are now generally available.
ThoughtSpot does not make pricing for its analytics tools public, but it revealed the cost for its Team Edition, Pro Edition and special version of the Pro Edition for startups, nonprofits and education institutions with fewer than 100 people and less than $10 million in annual revenue.
The Team Edition is available for a flat fee of $95 per month for a single group of users with an unlimited number of users.
The Pro Edition starts at $2,500 per month for up to five user groups with an unlimited number of users within those groups, but users could be charged more based on consumption. The special version of the Pro Edition, however, is available for a flat fee of $2,500 per month without being subject to any additional costs based on consumption.
"New pricing models are always important, and it's clear that ThoughtSpot is getting aggressive with … particularly, the consumption-based pricing options," Henschen said. "They're looking for more ways to get their foot in the door and to remove buying objections."
