Every company believes they send out a crystal clear message about their software product. We certainly aim to. So it’s always a surprise to hear from potential customers or from online sources who think our product is something radically different.
When our software team developed it, we knew we’d have to educate people on what a self-service analytics platform that’s purpose-built for embedding is. And, despite our best efforts, sometimes misconceptions about Izenda remain.
Embedded BI misconceptions – and the reality
Here’s a few we’ve heard recently:
- Izenda takes a long time to deploy. It’s hard to find information much more wrong than this. You can get an Izenda self-service BI portal working out of the box in 30 minutes. Your development team can complete an embedded integration in about 30 days. And we have partners who have worked extensively with our platform who can assist in expediting your analytics implementation.
- Izenda has limited database support. Our platform reports against the database systems most commonly used by businesses: Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft Azure. Customers who have other data sources can create their own data connectors.
- Izenda has limited platform support. Izenda is completely platform-agnostic, so it can be embedded in web applications built on any stack. An open front end and exposed API with many end points make our platform highly configurable.
- Izenda fails to support modern capabilities. Our application is built for embedding using a modern web architecture. It’s designed to scale with your application growth, and to accommodate its future needs.
- Izenda forces customers to learn a proprietary programming language. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our platform was developed using common programming languages like C#, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Although developers are needed during the embedding project, actual day to day use (creating reports and dashboards, adding new users, scheduling reports, and more) is end user-friendly and requires no coding. Power users can even build SQL commands using an expression helper that translates queries into the SQL appropriate to your RDBMS.
- Izenda should allow database writebacks. Some vendors think end users should be able to perform updates to their databases on the fly using their analytics solution. While that might be convenient, it’s problematic for a number of reasons. It complicates security, since you don’t want everyone who can view a field to be able to change it. And it requires duplicating whatever validation currently exists for that field in your application, as well as duplicating transactions to logs or audit trails. But, beyond all that, with Izenda, writebacks are completely unnecessary, because you can embed analytics components like charts and visualizations directly onto pages of your application, including any pages where end users perform CRUD operations.
We released the latest version of our platform earlier this year, so we understand that some web resources (as well as our competitors) may not be up to speed on its features. Has it been a while since you looked at a BI platform? Now is a good time to see what modern embedded analytics can do for your application. Schedule a personalized demo with one of our product experts.
