Why ISVs Should Embed Analytics, Not Build It

You’re an ISV (Independent Software Vendor). Your customers love your product, but now they want more: interactive dashboards, advanced reports, predictive insights, all built right into your software.

You see the potential. Embedded analytics could make your product stickier, smarter, and more valuable. But then reality hits: should you build this analytics capability yourself, or should you buy (embed) an existing platform?

This is what’s known as the “buy vs build” decision, a strategic choice that can make or break your roadmap.

It is a trap that many ISVs get caught in: the seduction of having control and flexibility lures them into the “build” mindset. But then what begins as an exciting project often becomes a resource-devouring black hole that sucks time, budget, and focus away from your core product.

As an ISV, your true strength lies in your domain expertise, your technology vision, and your ability to innovate in your market niche, not in reinventing an analytics platform.

Building teams with specialized analytics product skills—data modeling, visualization engines, diverse data sources, ML-based insights—takes time, money, and significant CXO bandwidth. It’s a long, resource-hungry journey that distracts from your primary mission: advancing your product roadmap and deepening your domain leadership.

Okay, so why is baking analytics directly into your software the better move for today’s software companies? It’s simpler, quicker to get going, and scales way easier.

1. Deconstructing the ‘Buy vs Build’ Decision for Analytics

What exactly is ‘buy vs. build?’ At its essence, it’s your decision between purchasing off-the-shelf products and building custom solutions. Your choice here dramatically affects not just your immediate operational efficiency and expense but also your competitive posture. It strongly influences whether you get to market fast or slow and whether you outpace or fall behind your competitors.

The Build Path: The Allure and the Agony

On paper, “build” looks tempting. You get full control. You can design every feature to match your product perfectly. But in practice, the cost of control can be crippling.

Pros:

• Full control: You own every line of code.
• Ultimate customization: Tailor every report, chart, and dashboard.
• Potential differentiation: If analytics is core to your product, it could offer a unique edge.

Cons:

• Immense resource drain: Your best developers may spend years building analytics rather than enhancing your primary product.
• Sky-high costs: Beyond development, you will have ongoing maintenance, patching, and scaling expenses.
• Slow time-to-market: While you are still working on code, competitors are already releasing embedded analytics.
• Distraction from core competency: You are a software vendor, not an analytics firm, so distract yourself from your core competency. Building analytical engines is not your work, and it shows.

Building an analytics product requires an entirely different skillset: specialized data scientists, product managers who understand the analytics lifecycle, and engineers who can keep up with a constantly evolving space involving AI, LLMs, predictive models, and machine learning.

Even after building it, you must continue evolving it to stay relevant, something that demands patience, long-term R&D investment, and constant innovation.

Imagine you’re a SaaS platform for HR automation. You decide to build in-house analytics to show employee engagement trends. Six months later, your developers are knee-deep in SQL queries and data visualization bugs, and your next product release is delayed. That’s the agony of “build.”

The ROI Reality Check

Even if you manage to build an analytics layer for your own platform, justifying the ROI becomes difficult. Unless your goal is to launch a standalone BI product, the investment often outweighs the returns.

The analytics platform will consume vast bandwidth, but its benefits will remain limited to your own customer base, making the cost hard to justify for most ISVs.

The Buy Path: The Smart Shortcut

“Buy” doesn’t mean compromising. It means capitalizing on expertise that already exists and focusing your internal energy where it matters most.

Pros:

• Speed: Go live in weeks, not years.
• Cost-effectiveness: Lower upfront and ongoing costs.
• Proven & scalable: You benefit from a platform refined over the years.
• Focus: Your team stays focused on your product’s unique value.

Cons (The Traditional View):

• Less customization: You work within the framework the vendor provides.
• Vendor or Partner dependence: You rely on their roadmap for new features.

But with modern embedded analytics solutions, these “cons” are becoming obsolete. Let’s see why.

2. Why ‘Buy’ Is the Undisputed Winner for ISVs

For ISVs, ‘buy’ really means ‘embed,’ integrating a pre-built analytics engine right inside your application.

Instead of spending years reinventing analytics, you embed intelligence directly into your product’s workflow. The result? You deliver value faster, reduce risk, and scale smarter.

Embedding analytics allows you to focus your time and team energy on what matters: your domain innovation, your product’s differentiation, and your customer experience.

Let the analytics experts handle the BI complexity while you double down on your technical strengths.

Putting analytics in isn’t about getting help from outside (or outsourcing); it’s about making your product better. You’re adding top skills your users look for, without the extra work of starting from zero.

Think of it as plugging in excellence instead of manufacturing it in-house.

The benefits? There are many.

Accelerate Your Time-to-Market

Every month that you delay getting analytics to your customers is a month that they may switch to a competing product. By embedding a ready-made platform, you can offer fully Functional Dashboards and Predictive Insights within weeks, not years.

Reduce Development Risk & Cost

Building analytics internally can easily run into millions in development and maintenance costs. Embedding shifts that risk to a specialized vendor, letting your team focus on delivering core product features.

Capitalize on Continuous Innovation

We at Smarten are regularly updating our platform with new features, be it AI and ML support or expanded visualization capabilities. As an ISV, you automatically benefit from these updates without any additional work.

Note: Keeping up with analytics evolution, AI, ML, predictive modeling, and LLM-based insights requires ongoing research and niche expertise. With Smarten, you inherit that innovation without needing to invest years of R&D yourself!

Enhance Your Core Product, Not Your To-Do List

Analytics becomes a feature, not a project. Your roadmap remains focused on your domain, while your customers enjoy enterprise-grade intelligence. Your product gets stickier, smarter, and more competitive, without slowing your team down.

3. The Smarten Difference: More Than Just an Embedded Tool

So why choose Smarten for your analytics “buy” decision?

Because Smarten is not merely another BI Tool. Smarten is a complete Augmented Analytics Ecosystem, designed for embedding and built on two decades of software excellence.

Developed by Elegant MicroWeb, Smarten combines advanced analytics, augmented intelligence, and low-code/no-code (LCNC) ease of use, with built-in embedding for ISVs.

Powered by Augmented Intelligence

Smarten goes far beyond basic dashboards.

Its Smarten Auto Insights feature uses ML and NLP to turn raw data into plain-language insights, automatically.

Your customers won’t have to deal with algorithms or query language at all. All they have to do is pick a dataset and let Smarten do the hard work, choosing the appropriate model (classification, regression, forecasting) and showing the outputs in simple, visual, and easy-to-grasp formats.

No guesswork. No coding. Just clarity.

This is Clickless Analytics. Basically, analytics that thinks for you.

For ISVs, this isn’t just another feature. It’s a true differentiator that makes your product future-ready.

Built on a Scalable, Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) Foundation

Smarten’s Managed Memory Computing ensures high performance even with large datasets.

The low-code/no-code framework lets ISVs easily personalize, rebrand, and embed analytics into their existing UI with no compromise on stability.

You get dependability where it counts and flexibility where you need it.

Backed by a Deep Bench of Expertise

Elegant MicroWeb offers unmatched technical and domain knowledge spanning more than two decades of software product expertise.

Behind Smarten is a group of India-based data scientists, engineers, Business Intelligence (BI) specialists, and product designers, all striving to make complex analytics embeddable and accessible.

Smarten’s journey itself reflects how long and specialized the analytics product path truly is—starting over a decade ago from simple visualization and reporting tools, evolving through traditional BI, and now leading with augmented analytics.

It takes years, not months, to build a robust analytics product, and Smarten has already done that heavy lifting for you!

Picking Smarten not only buys a program but also links you with a group that guarantees your analysis remains cutting-edge.

From building your first dataset to rolling out analytics templates, from go-to-market support to post-launch evolution, Smarten stands beside ISVs every step of the way.

Aligned with Industry Evolution

Smarten is built for the future, not the past.

According to Gartner, early adopters of augmented analytics will realize greater strategic benefits than those who wait.

Gartner estimates that 90% of consumers of analytics material will be content creators, powered by Augmented Analytics, by 2025. And by 2027, AI Agents will motivate or improve 50% corporate decisions.

Smarten conforms with these trends of integrating intelligence into daily processes and enabling consumers to act quickly and more intelligently.

With Smarten, your ISV product isn’t just keeping up with the future; it’s helping define it, with an analytics foundation that continuously evolves alongside your business.

Smarten in Action: Simplifying the Complex

Here’s what makes Smarten stand out:

• Self-serve data discovery with advanced visualization and natural language querying.
• Smart visualization that auto-selects the best chart for your data.
• Assisted predictive modeling that guides users toward better decisions.
• SnapShot monitoring and Key Influencer Analytics to detect anomalies and patterns in real-time.

All this happens in an intuitive, mobile-friendly environment, designed for business users, not just data scientists.

Ready to Embed Intelligence Into Your ISV Product?

In today’s fast-paced software market, building analytics in-house is like forging your own tools while your competitors are already building skyscrapers.

The buy vs build debate may be old, but for ISVs, the verdict is clear: Buy smart. Embed smarter.

Focus your energy where it creates the most impact: building your domain expertise, advancing your product roadmap, and growing your technical edge.

Let Smarten take care of the analytics journey for you.

With Smarten’s embedded augmented analytics, you can deliver next-generation intelligence to your users, faster and more efficiently without draining your time, budget, or focus.

Contact Smarten Today

Transform your application into a truly intelligent platform.

Utilize Smarten’s embedded analytics to delight your users, accelerate growth, and future-proof your product.

Partner with Smarten—a team that walks with you from concept to rollout, ensuring your analytics integration succeeds at every stage.

Contact Us Today to explore how our low-code, high-intelligence analytics can empower your ISV journey.

FAQs

1. What does the “buy vs build” decision mean for ISVs?

It’s the choice between creating analytics in-house or embedding a ready-made solution like Smarten into your software.

2. How does embedding analytics benefit my product?

You deliver powerful dashboards and insights faster, with lower costs and zero maintenance burden, which enhances customer satisfaction.

3. Can I still customize embedded analytics from Smarten?

Yes. Smarten’s low-code/no-code architecture lets you brand, tweak, and integrate analytics seamlessly into your app.

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