The future of analytics is aggregated experiences

It's frickin hard to keep up with the changes in the modern world. Over the last 10 years, the number of tools for businesses has exploded (there's number floating around that there are nearly 25,000 SaaS companies). As new tools pop up, they're serving smaller and smaller niches. Meanwhile, incumbent tools are becoming more capable while accelerating developer and user experiences.

And businesses have been responding with their checkbooks (or crypto wallets, to use a more modern phrase). The small edge that's given with these hyper-niched products are being gobbled up. Smaller businesses aren't as stuck to the generalized solutions that were available a decade ago.

But big businesses are also finding themselves with multiple incumbent tools in different parts of their organization. With separate budgets, decision makers, and talent pools for different organizations within the business, this is inevitable. And even though converging on one tool for the entire business sounds reasonable, it's about as likely as making the entire world use a MacBook. Or a Surface Pro. It's more of a political argument than an objective one.

What Does This Mean?

In the analytics world, you'll hear about Tableau vs. Power BI vs. ThoughtSpot vs. Qlik vs. Looker vs. "the next tool up".

Which one should your organization go with? Which one is better? Which one is a cult?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to those questions. The only blanket statement that could be made is that the smaller your budget and business, the more you should eliminate and avoid duplicity in tooling. For bigger businesses, you probably already have several analytics tools, and that's ok. But that's only because of where the future is heading.

The Future

Quite simply, it's aggregation. I'm not talking about the mathematical aggregation. I'm not talking about tools purchasing tools (although that will happen too).

I'm talking about aggregating all your tools into a single front-end user experience.

This means as a user, you login once, and you have access to Tableau, Power BI, ThoughtSpot, Looker, Google Data Studio, whatever. All insights in one location. No need for 15 bookmarks.

And the great news is...

In fancy words, it's called Embedded Analytics. And while you could piece together your own interfaces by getting a developer to dig into all of the analytics tools' APIs... there actually isn't a need. There's a tool called Curator by InterWorks that already does this with Tableau and Power BI.

No this isn't an ad for their product, but it's something we've come across with clients at MergeYourData.com (my company). And it's amazing. It replaces Tableau's rudimentary interface with a modern application look, but also lets you bring in Power BI content without users being able to tell the difference.

I only imagine that they'll keep adding additional analytics platforms into their tool. I can also imagine that there will be other tools pop-up that are competitors with Curator.

Embedded analytics is getting hot, and aggregation into one embedded experience is a natural development of that.

By the way... all the analytics tools are cults.