Which Customizations Are Possible So Embedded Analytics Can Match My Brand?

Now that we have a solid understanding of choosing an embedded analytics BI platform that integrates well with your application’s security, let’s consider a few ways to ensure that customizations are compatible with your brand.

Which Customizations Are Possible So Embedded Analytics Can Match My Brand?

Definitions

In this chapter, it might help to brush up on the following definitions:

White label – A B2B software product that has no branding or boasts branding customization features.

Here’s What You Need To Know

What customization options are available to ensure a consistent visual style between your embedded analytics tool and my software product?

The main focus of this chapter is understanding that if you embed a solution without your application, the last thing you want is another business’s branding to dominate what your end-users see. No matter your app’s use case, you should only invest in embedded analytics software that can be white-labeled.

It doesn’t look good for your brand if every functionality of your app is accompanied by “Powered by [Vendor].”

When demoing your prospective platform, consider a few key things from the demo alone. Can you see many branding presents, such as logos, “powered by” statements, URL links, and other elements? If so, dig a little deeper to see if they are removable. Just as well, a good platform will make it possible to change element colors to match your branding, change the terminology items that appear on your app’s home screen, and change the visualization layouts of styles to match your branding. A highly customizable BI platform should also boast multi-lingual support, especially if your app is designed to be used on a global level.

In general, self-hosted BI tools come from vendors that put much more control in the hands of their customers.

Cloud-based BI tools are often very brand-heavy and not very customizable, though they have their use cases that we have mentioned in previous chapters.

Can it make your analytics interface look different, unlike traditional analytics?

Consider exactly how much customization your chosen tool can provide. In general, you can take two different approaches to customize your tool’s interface to align with your brand– the developer approach, the API approach, and the vendor customization approach.

The developer approach involves using the BI platform as a developer tool with an experienced developer on your project team. With such a professional in place, you’ll be able to design virtually whatever you want without much concern over the loose limits set by the vendor.

The API approach still allows you to leverage your BI platform to offer dynamic security and easy-to-build report queries. However, instead of displaying the out-of-the-box visualizations of the BI platform, you’ll pull the data needed and bind it to any custom web page layout or component you choose. It’s not about customizing your app visualizations from scratch, but rather is about getting a customized look and feel without the need for intensive developer work and added development timelines.

The vendor customization method is typically used for smaller vendors and not big-name industry enterprises like Microsoft and Oracle. For larger vendors, group communities will usually pop up with customization solutions. For many smaller vendors, however, they will often offer services for customizing their platform and aligning your end product with your unique branding.

These vendors are often few and far between and usually don’t list their vendor customization services, so it might be worth getting in contact with a vendor rep to ask about what they offer in terms of customization. You might be surprised by their offerings, which differ little from having an established outsources virtual BI development team. Just as well, such vendor services are often a fraction of the cost of doing it all on your own or paying a larger vendor to work with you.

Conclusion

Personalization and customizability is the key to a good BI platform.

The last thing you want is to have a vendor’s branding overwhelm your own.

Ensure that your chosen BI platform is highly customizable and can easily remove any vendor branding once integrated with your app. If this isn’t possible, you might want to look elsewhere.

The next chapter talks about the capability of the solutions to be scaled to your expected number of users. It is important that you know to do it, so stick around.