Eliminating SaaS data silos with the Modern Analytics Cloud
Updated: Jul 13, 2023
The Cloud and SaaS applications have become core elements of almost every business - large and small alike. SaaS applications like HubSpot, Salesforce, JIRA, Xero and Monday are critical business systems, used across millions of businesses everyday. Inside these SaaS applications is a wealth of data, data that contains insights, that can and should be used on a daily basis to drive the direction of the business.
The problem is eliminating the data silos. How do you get the data out of these SaaS silos and into an analytics platform to release the power of the data and provide insights to business users in a way that makes it easy and usable? The answer is to add more SaaS applications. I get the irony.
Traditionally BI and analytics has involved big, expensive and complex ETL products that require highly specialised skills and long implementation timeframes, to move data into on premise Data Warehouses. They then use Desktop based BI tools like PowerBI and Tableau to create static dashboards for business users to consume. But analytics has changed. Changed a lot. And changed really fast.
In the modern data analytics world, we have new SaaS ETL tools like FiveTran, Hevo and Matillion that provide pre-built SaaS connectors for many of the most popular SaaS business tools. It has become a point and click exercise to connect a SaaS application like HubSpot or JIRA and to move your data into a Cloud Data Warehouse like SnowFlake, RedShit, GBQ or Azure Synapse.
Once the data is in any of the modern Cloud Data Warehouses, it’s immediately usable by a modern BI tools like ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot has been purpose built for business users. It provides live analytics through a Search and AI driven interface, to enable business users to ask their own live questions of their business data, no more static pre-canned dashboards with data that is a week old. The entire end-to-end process of using your SAAS application and seeing the data in ThoughtSpot, can now happen in near real time.
ThoughtSpot has just released the final piece of the puzzle, with SpotApps. SpotApps provide pre-built liveboards for business applications. At PivotAnalytics, we have worked in partnership with ThoughtSpot to develop the JIRA ApotApp. We have designed this SpotApp to utilise the pre-built connectors of Hevo, to minimise the deployment time and maximise the business benefits. What this means is that using the Hevo JIRA Connector, you can load your JIRA data into your Cloud Data Warehouse in a matter of minutes. From there the SpotApp includes a small number of scripts to create views in your CDW that work restructure your data to perfectly align with the JIRA SpotApp. Connecting your CDW to ThoughtSpot can be completed in less than 10 minutes. The final step is to install the JIRA SpotApp, again this can be completed in less than 10 minutes.
All up the end-to-end process of having your data in JIRA and being able to use ThoughtSpot’s search, to ask your own questions can be completed in less than an hour!
So far ThoughtSpot has announced the release of ServiceNow, JIRA and Google Analytics SpotApps. Pivot Analytics are also currently working on a Facebook Business Page SpotApp and a Facebook Ads SpotApp. The SpotApp is a game changer for business users.
If you would like to see the JIRA SpotApp in action check out our 5 minute video walkthrough.
Whether you generate revenue of $5 million or $500 million, get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help you maximise the value of your data.
Get in touch with us via email at info@pivotanalytics.com.au or calling 1300 475 510.
