Logi analytics suite to add new GenAI, SaaS capabilities
Insightsoftware, parent company of the embedded BI specialist, unveiled a new generative AI assistant and SaaS version of Symphony to enable efficiency and cost savings.
Insightsoftware unveiled new generative AI and SaaS capabilities for Logi Symphony, the vendor's primary platform for embedded analytics.
Logi Symphony is an embedded BI suite launched in October 2023 that combines the capabilities of the formerly independent Logi Analytics with those of other Insightsoftware platforms.
Logi Analytics was acquired by Insightsoftware in April 2021 for an undisclosed sum and now serves as the flagship brand for Insightsoftware's embedded analytics tools, including capabilities that enable customers to build and brand applications to sell to their own customers. In addition to Logi Analytics, the Logi brand now includes capabilities from embedded analytics vendors Exago, Izenda and Dundas, which were also acquired by Insightsoftware.
New capabilities, meanwhile, include Logi AI and Logi SaaS, both of which are generally available after being released on April 25.
Logi AI is an embeddable feature that provides customers with customizable generative AI chat capabilities along with predictive insights tailored to the needs of end users. Logi SaaS is a fully managed version of Symphony that aims to streamline time to value.
Given that AI -- generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in particular -- has been the dominant trend in analytics for more than a year, Logi AI is an important addition for Insightsoftware customers, according to Mike Leone, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.
With generative AI and LLMs being top of mind for so many organizations, it's imperative that every analytics vendor incorporates it in a way that best suits customers' needs.
Mike LeoneAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
"Logi is known for being a leader in embedded analytics," he said. "That approach has enabled customers to gain more confidence with data exploration and experimentation. With generative AI and LLMs being top of mind for so many organizations, it's imperative that every analytics vendor incorporates it in a way that best suits customers' needs."
Based in Raleigh, N.C., Insightsoftware specializes in financial reporting and budgeting ERP software. Logi Analytics, meanwhile, was an embedded analytics specialist that operated independently for 21 years before it was acquired.
Despite its long history, Logi Analytics was small compared with competitors such as Sisense and Domo, which also specialize in embedded analytics. While Domo has raised $714.7 million in funding and Sisense $274.7 million, Logi raised only $48 million in four funding rounds before becoming part of Insightsoftware.
Generative AI has been the dominant trend in data management and analytics for the 18 months since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an LLM that was a significant improvement in generative AI capabilities.
In particular, ChatGPT and the many other LLMs such as Google Gemini and Meta Llama that have followed enable true natural language processing (NLP) so that data consumers can interact with data using natural language rather than code.
Historically, analytics platforms have been complex tools, usually requiring users to write code to prepare, query and analyze data. That limited how many people within organizations could work with the tools, with use hovering around a quarter of all employees since the start of the 21st century.
Many vendors attempted to develop NLP capabilities, but the features they built had only limited vocabularies and thus still required data literacy training to use. LLMs, trained on vast amounts of public data, changed that with vocabularies as voluminous as the Oxford English Dictionary and an ability to infer intent.
As a result, many data management and analytics vendors have added LLM capabilities to their platforms to develop generative AI assistants and other tools aimed at enabling users of any skill level to interact with data using natural language. In addition, because such generative AI tools can translate text to code and generate code on their own, AI assistants can boost the efficiency of data experts by reducing the need to write code to carry out every task.
Insightsoftware is now the latest vendor to introduce such generative AI capabilities.
Logi AI is an AI tool that aims to enable users to interact with data in natural language in a customized, secure way that can be embedded into dashboards, reports, self-service analytics interfaces and applications. The feature was developed with prompt engineering to provide context awareness that improves the relevance and accuracy of responses, and chat flows can be tailored beyond the initial engineering to further reduce the likelihood of irrelevant responses.
In addition, Logi AI integrates any LLM or small language model with an organization's proprietary data. This enables the model to understand the organization's unique attributes and do so with a data governance model that aims to keep proprietary data safe and secure.
As a result of that pliability when integrating with language models, Logi AI's tool stands apart from many of the AI assistants developed by other analytics vendors, according to Leone.
"Logi AI has a powerful angle where it's a combination of offering customers flexibility in how they want to leverage LLMs while also maintaining the key governance and trust constructs that are required to make generative AI enterprise-ready," he said.
The feature should help Logi Symphony users get started with generative AI in a simple way, Leone continued. Logi AI also should enable customers to diversify and scale their analytics use.
"Its use to support more diverse analytics use cases with ... simplicity is so important," he said.
While Logi AI provides Logi Symphony users with embeddable generative AI capabilities now, it also represents capabilities that are important to Insightsoftware's analytics roadmap, according to Jay Allardyce, the vendor's general manager for data and analytics.
The feature is something customers have been discussing, and Insightsoftware is aware of other vendors making it a focus of their product development as well, he noted. Among analytics vendors, MicroStrategy was the first to develop embeddable generative AI tools, launching an embeddable bot in March 2024.
Insightsoftware follows close behind.
"This is a hot topic for our customers and the market and is central to our roadmap and product positioning going forward," Allardyce said. "Our goal is to create an AI analytics ecosystem and push the envelope for generative BI and AI."
While Logi AI targets users and aims to simplify analytics, Logi SaaS is designed to make application development easier and more cost-efficient.
The managed service includes a containerized deployment model that enables scalable growth while helping control costs with an efficient use of compute power. In addition, there are licensing options designed to make Logi SaaS affordable for SMBs in addition to larger enterprises.
Insightsoftware does not publicize pricing.
User wants
The impetus for developing Logi SaaS came largely from Insightsoftware's observations from discussions with potential new users, according to Allardyce.
As more organizations have migrated their data to cloud data warehouses, lakes and lakehouses, they want analytics tools that exist in the same environment where their data and applications are hosted. By adding a SaaS version of Logi Symphony, Insightsoftware aims to provide a platform that does exactly that to enable users to develop and launch products faster, easier and more cost-effectively.
"With our general message of low-code/no-code embedded [analytics], we needed a way to make adding analytics to our customers' applications even easier," Allardyce said. "Having a SaaS offering in addition to our on-premises or private cloud options was a natural next step."
Beyond working in the same cloud environments where data is now stored, Logi SaaS is a significant offering given its potential to address the costs and effort associated with application development and maintenance, according to Leone.
Maintenance, upgrades and security issues require significant expenditures, adding up to more than $100,000 annually per developer, according to Insightsoftware. Any step to reduce that is important.
"[After development] is really where Logi SaaS comes in by not only reducing the time to market for applications, but also by offering a scalable and cost-effective way to address common development hurdles like ongoing maintenance and security," Leone said.
Plans
With Logi AI and Logi SaaS now available, Insightsoftware's roadmap for its embedded analytics platform will center around AI, according to Allardyce.
Specific areas of focus include making AI part of the vendor's write-back capabilities, notifications and analysis, metadata assistance, and collaboration tools, he continued.
"AI will be a strong focus in our roadmap, focusing on native AI capabilities and the ability to build applications with AI as the foundation," Allardyce said.
In addition, Insightsoftware is working to have an analytics offering available in each of the major cloud marketplaces so that customers can use Logi Symphony in concert with the preferred clouds of their own customers, he added.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
