Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

White Paper

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AbstractToday’s businesses compete on data. Whether it is increasing manufacturing yields, boosting market-ing ROI or improving customer satisfaction, businesses want to improve their bottom line using data-driven insights.

But it’s not just businesses that have taken a liking for data-driven decisions. Individuals are making more informed choices in their day-to-day lives through data-driven insights too.

This white paper explains how by embedding dashboards into their products, Independent Soft-ware Vendors (ISVs) are empowering businesses and individuals by providing them valuable insights gleaned from their data. This in turn is helping ISVs enhance the overall value of their products by offer-ing a more evolved experience to the user. This paper also discusses how ISVs who have not embraced information dashboards yet can embed powerful and sophisticated ones into their products without disrupting their agile release cycles.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

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Dashboards & their role in the business decision making process

Displaying crucial information about your speed, RPM and fuel level, a car dashboard helps you monitor and keep track of things-that-matter while driving.

Similar to a car dashboard, an information dashboard helps businesses keep track of their key metrics and drive effective decisions. However, unlike a car dashboard which monitors only real time opera-tions, the scope of an information dashboard is much broader. In addition to monitoring real time operations and alerting users about any deviations (operational dashboard), an information dashboard can also provide data that helps users understand trends and find the reason behind a cause (analytical dashboard). They can also provide top-level executives the data they need to understand the health of the business and help identify potential opportunities for growth and expansion (strategic dashboard).

The information dashboard is an interface between the past, present and future of the organization. On the one hand, it integrates historical data of an organization. On the other hand, it provides continuous monitoring and feedback of present performance metrics. And behind its interface lies the key to the future—systems for predictive analysis and decision support. Simply put, a dashboard allows visuali-zation of complex data and their relationships in a format that can be easily understood by decision-makers.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Dashboards in actionToday, many B2B products come with embedded dashboards that provide users with crucial business insights. With a visually compelling interface, a high level of interactivity and options to slice and dice data as required, these dashboards are changing the way business users absorb data.

If you have ever done anything web, chances are you have heard of Google Analytics. Its dashboard helps users monitor website traffic, track conversions and keep a handle on the overall revenue. 

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Salesforce, one of the world’s most used CRM application, offers sales reps at-a-glance insights into pipe-line performance, closed business, conversion rates and more.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Viewabill, a cloud-based billing application, enables clients of legal, accounting and consulting firms to manage and monitor all pre-bill activity in real-time.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

FlashPanel empowers IT admins to manage and secure Google Apps more effectively. Its dashboard provides a single point overview of user activity, license usage, as well as vital stats about quota usage for Drive and Gmail.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Think dashboards are for B2B products only? Well, think again.

Dashboards are not restricted to enterprise applications alone. They are increasingly finding a place in apps used by common people to manage and analyze their day-to-day tasks.

Mint, an online personal finance and money management app, helps users manage their budgets and keep track of their spending. Using the dashboard, users can monitor multiple bank accounts in one place, set alerts for any deviations, analyze the top movers and shakers in their stock portfolio and also set budget targets.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Fitbit, a popular activity and sleep tracker, provides a dashboard to its users to track their health and fit-ness goals. It provides a snapshot of calorie intake, exercise habits and sleep duration.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

RescueTime is a personal web-based time management tool that allows you to understand how you spend your time on the computer. Their dashboard gives a bird’s eye view of your work habits with an option to drill-down for more information.

Building competitive advantage for your product through a dashboardA survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group titled Data, Discovery, Action in early 2013 found that more and more enterprise decision makers want or need analytical capability. While performing their tasks in CRM, ERP and other business applications, they are looking for better visibility, better reporting and

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

quicker access to performance metrics. Due to this growing interest in analytical engagement, ISVs know that providing these capabilities will help them differentiate and improve their competitive positioning.

Ramana Rao, Founder and CTO, Inxight Software Inc., says that “[in] five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year.” 

Dashboards also help ISVs strengthen the overall value of their product portfolio and attract new cus-tomers. Bit.ly is a classic example of how adding a dashboard to the product helped them boost its aver-age selling price, and open up new opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Launched in 2008, Bit.ly was just a URL shortening service to begin with. In 2009, it announced the launch of its Pro version (free) which allowed publishers to use their custom short domain names to point to pages on their sites. In addition to this, the Pro version also included a dashboard, which provided a real-time view of how a given publisher’s content is being distributed across networks like Twitter and Facebook, and services like email and SMS.

In 2010, it launched its enterprise edition (paid) which among other features had an advanced dash-board that allowed publishers, marketers and brands at large measure their social media efforts. Using this dashboard, they could analyze the number of clicks they have driven to a particular story against the overall user engagement. It also allowed them to look at different measures of viral success—the number of times a particular article has been shortened and shared, compared to the aggregate number of clicks it received. Users could also access detailed location and referrer data from the dashboard.

From a free product used to shorten URLs, its paid Enterprise version now boasts of names like The Huffington Post, GE, Ford and Heineken who use it to gain audience insight and benchmark their social media efforts.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

BillQuick, a time tracking, project management, billing and accounting solution, also charges a premium for its Enterprise version by providing a customizable dashboard as part of the offering.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Building a dashboard is easier, faster and more cost-effective than you thinkBuilding a dashboard is not rocket science. With a clear understanding of what information will your us-ers need and the right tools needed to do the job, you can embed a sophisticated dashboard into your product as well.

There are readymade dashboard components like charts, tables, gauges, newsfeed and maps available in the market that empower you to build complex dashboards within a couple of days. The years of special-ized R&D behind them helps your product benefit from the expertise, while you save some crucial devel-opment time and stay the course on your release cycle too.

Data visualization plays a particularly important role in an information dashboard given the amount of data that has to be crunched to lead to key business insights. Using ready-made charting components, you can add data visualization capabilities to your dashboard within a matter of hours. Enterprise-grade charting components among these come with built-in reporting capabilities like drill-down, export to images, tooltips and zooming that enable you to give your users the powerful reporting experience that they need. They provide a wide range of chart types so you can facilitate all kinds of data analysis on the dashboard. And some enterprise-grade charting components also provide readymade dashboards that you can just plug into your product to have a complete dashboard for yourself.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

ClickTale, a leading customer experience and web analytics solution with visitor recording and heat maps, uses a third-party charting component for visualizing data on its dashboard.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Localytics, a mobile analytics app, has designed its dashboard in-house keeping the unique needs of the mobile analytics customer in mind but uses a third-party charting component for data visualization.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

Stock Market HD: Stocks & Shares uses a third party news feed API to inform users about the latest news regarding a particular stock.

ConclusionUsing enterprise-grade components, software teams can build powerful dashboards with advanced capabilities into their products in a matter of days. Users benefit from higher levels of productivity, a bet-ter experience and data-driven decision making. ISVs on the other hand, create a competitive edge for themselves, broaden their customer base and command higher prices. Add to it the rewards of higher customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and longer periods of engagement and in the end, it is a win-win situation for both.

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age

About FusionChartsFusionCharts Suite XT is the industry’s leading enterprise-grade charting component with delightful JavaScript (HTML5) charts that work across devices and browsers (including IE 6, 7 and 8). Using it, you can create your first chart in under 15 minutes and then add advanced reporting capabilities like drill-down and zoom in a couple of hours after that. It comes with extensive docs, demos and personalized tech support that makes sure implementation is a breeze for you.

22,000 customers and 500,000 developers in 120 countries including organizations like NASA, Micro-soft, Cisco, GE, AT&T and World Bank use FusionCharts Suite XT to go from data to delight in minutes.

Learn more about how you can add delight to your products at www.fusioncharts.com

Reference:

a. Michael Lock, “Embedded Analytics for ISVs: Honing a Competitive Edge with BI”, Aberdeen Group, June, 2013

b. http://blog.bitly.com/post/356400453/bit-ly-pro-open-beta-and-enterprise-service

c. http://blog.bitly.com/post/284009728/announcing-bit-ly-pro

d. http://blog.bitly.com/post/841764434/dashboard-2-0

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Dashboards: Helping ISVs create a competitive advantage in a data-driven age