Data is everywhere. As the sheer volume and number of data sources continue to explode, so do new opportunities for modern businesses to create and act on insights. That is if they are equipped with the right analytics technology.
Historically, many businesses have settled for “good enough” analytics tools, putting up with lackluster bundles from full-stack vendors in an attempt to minimize cost or risk. But as ThoughtSpot Chief Data Strategy Officer, Cindi Howson shared at Beyond 2021, the modern data stack throws this approach right out the window. Now best-in-class is not only the better investment but the faster, surer path to innovation as well.
The problem with legacy BI tools
The rise of cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Azure, and others have made business data instantly available and scalable for modern teams. But the value of these multi-million dollar infrastructure investments is immediately lost when you pair them with traditional desktop BI tools.
Think about it. To build a dashboard in a visual discovery tool, you first start by pulling that data from your cloud data platform onto the desktop. Then you create an extract or cube and publish it back to another server. In doing so, you’ve killed all the goodness and scale of your cloud data platform, made your data pipelines more complex, added the risk of loads and refreshes failing, and exacerbated multiple versions of the truth.
It’s a legacy process, not designed to maximize the modern data stack.
Bringing agility and scale to your entire analytics workflow
With leaders in analytics now outperforming laggards across every KPI, you need an analytics solution that fully leverages the agility and scale of your cloud data platform. Here are three reasons you need modern cloud analytics now:
Access to granular data: As we’ve already covered, your business has a lot of data. But not enough of it is accessible at a granular level. If all you’ve done is store your data in Snowflake or Databricks, without ceasing legacy data extracts, you haven’t modernized. You’ve only migrated. Real insights happen at the row level. The ability to drill down without limitations or pre-defined paths, is critical to making smarter, data-driven decisions that move the needle for your business.
Faster insights: Digital business means delivering and acting on insights at the speed of business. Take for example JustEat Takeaway.com, who shared at Beyond 2021 how their restaurant partners need to know by the hour what’s selling, and by the minute which roads have unexpected traffic or which customers had a service incident. They can’t afford to wait days or weeks for a dashboard to reveal these insights. They need answers now. And the same is true for you.
Insights for all: And finally, insights should be available at the point of impact for workers at all levels. Data is now part of everyone’s job. As a sales manager, you may have an analytics platform for seeing customer churn trends. As a marketing professional, you might want these insights embedded in Salesforce or Marketo to decide your next campaign. And as an executive, you might want all of these insights synthesized in a beautiful chart to present at your next board meeting.
<br>All of this is only possible with a modern analytics platform designed for cloud speed and scale. To learn how ThoughtSpot is uniquely positioned to help your business capitalize on the cloud data ecosystem, and how leaders like Snowflake‘s Sunny Bedi are using the Modern Analytics Cloud to build their business on data, you can watch Beyond on-demand now.
