In a telecoms industry differentiated mainly by service and threatened by churn, gaining access to timely customer data initially drove internal demand for analytics and BI (ABI) reporting. When demand grew beyond customer service, our IT team really struggled to keep up. This set us off on a journey to find ways to help our colleagues to find insights and the answers to their questions themselves.
When dealing with payments, speed is king. Technology is increasing the speed at which innovation happens, and nowhere is that more apparent than how everyday commerce is transacted. Credit cards are now built with tap-to-pay capabilities, if you still even have a physical credit card. Phones have become the new credit card, with data from transactions and mobile banking adding to the overwhelming amount of data that can be collected.
Last year, Harvard Business Review and ThoughtSpot published a groundbreaking survey on the business benefits of empowering frontline workers with data. Revenues are higher, operations more efficient, customer service better, and employees happier. And yet, few organizations deploy BI this way, historically held back by the technology, conflicting priorities, and mindset.
Companies today are faced with an analytics conundrum. On one hand, there’s a higher demand than ever for actionable business insights, but on the other there’s limited resources to deliver BI content to on-technical business end-users. To fill this gap, the industry is increasingly turning to the next generation of self-service analytics tools. These tools reduce time to insight, speed up insight to action, and also allow BI teams to focus on more strategic analytics work.
Today, May 21st marks ThoughtSpot’s nine year anniversary as a company. We’ve come a long way from exchanging ideas at Starbucks and working from an office set-up inside LightSpeed Ventures for the initial few weeks. Today, we offer customers the most innovative cloud analytics platform in the world and help thousands of users ask and answer questions with data.
Today, the rate of innovation around data processing has accelerated beyond what any of us previously thought possible. Databricks recently announced their Databricks SQL offering, which is the next step in this evolution and builds on the foundation of Delta Lake to deliver interactive analytics at scale. This offering pairs with ThoughtSpot’s Modern Analytics Cloud to empower everyone in an organization to find answers to their questions with simple access to the data lake.
ThoughtSpot has revolutionized access to analytics for business users through search and AI. In addition to being a general purpose analytics tool that allows unprecedented access to business users, product builders can now use ThoughtSpot to deliver search-based analytics to customers. Today, we are launching a brand new SDK that allows you to embed ThoughtSpot into your own web app in literally minutes.
Since the start of the pandemic nearly a year ago, there's been one word on the lips of every business leader, analyst, and investor around the world: cloud. COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way businesses operate. In response, organizations went all in on cloud, betting on the unmatched scale, speed, and security of SaaS applications to help them weather the storm. Nowhere was this shift more pronounced that in our own data and analytics industry.
Have you ever looked at clouds with a friend and seen patterns, shapes, and animals that they just can’t make out? The images appear so obviously to you but no matter how hard you try to show them, your friend sees an entirely different shape, or perhaps nothing at all. Building product features can be a similar exercise in frustration. As designers and builders, sometimes we see our own “cloud shapes” in the product.
