ThoughtSpot previously described itself as ‘Google for numbers’, where it aims to make facts ‘as easily accessible as opinions’ via search. The company has undergone a change in recent years, as it moves its users to a cloud-based model in pursuit of ‘dashboard killing’.
Having a core cloud platform, CEO Sudheesh Nair is now complementing ThoughtSpot’s proposal by building an ecosystem, through integrations, that allows customers to competitively differentiate their data/infrastructure. stack. He is also shifting the company’s pricing model towards true usage -based pricing, which greatly reduces the start -up cost at ThoughtSpot.
With platform upgrades, which ThoughtSpot thinks are in the ‘connect, build, launch’ categories, Nair told diginomica the importance of expanding the company’s integration reach. He said:
ThoughtSpot has always been committed to delivering things that people have never experienced in the world of BI – search, AI, cloud first scale. But one of the main themes we see in the customer’s mind is there’s a change about how companies want to work, by combining the best race stacks with respect to architecture, as opposed to going for here. one stop shop.
You used to sign a contract and give the customer the best discount and they buy the full menu. What is happening now is that the data, or the infrastructure, is a competitive difference. So if we’re all shopping from the same place, everyone is buying the same stack, I have to find the difference in people, or the service I built myself. And that is a high level of risk.
So what they’re doing is they’re spreading the risk by saying we need to diversify the whole company-we need to diversify the product, we need to diversify the service, but so does the infrastructure-along with the data. In that context, what they want is a range of companies and products that are focused on working as an ecosystem, where there are opportunities to build a great architecture, by choosing the best breed, but in those companies that focused on teamwork. This is the change we see in the market.
New ThoughtSpot platform integrations include:
Connect
The ThoughtSpot platform now connects to a variety of data sources in the cloud, which include:
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Amazon Redshift Serverless – customers can now use ThoughtSpot’s Modern Analytics Cloud to run and measure analytics on Amazon Web Services without having to provide and manage data warehouse clusters.
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Snowflake Data Marketplace, including the new Snowflake Data Explorer app – ThoughtSpot customers can now create insights from third party data in the Snowflake Data Marketplace. This makes it possible to quickly prototype insights using new data sources for leading indicators.
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Databricks Partner Connect – gives Databricks customers the ability to launch a free ThoughtSpot trial from the Databricks console.
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Support for new architectures with connectors for both Dremio and Starburst Galaxy, giving customers the ability to access Live Analytics from a variety of architectures, including data mesh and data lake.
Build
ThoughtSpot customers can now benefit from new app development and integration capabilities, including:
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CodeSpot-a searchable repository of open-source ThoughtSpot blocks and code samples for developers to accelerate analytics embedding and app development using ThoughtSpot Everywhere. CodeSpot includes reusable, best-practice examples of the most common development tasks, such as custom actions, visualizations, APIs and tooling, formulas, and more.
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ELT Live Analytics templates are easily accessible with custom ELT jobs built to work with SpotApps and Matillion.
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The new third party data blocks the use of TML (ThoughtSpot Modeling Language) which gives customers the use of external data to enrich their own proprietary data for more meaningful insights. Data providers include Ibotta, Safegraph, Windfall, and FactSet.
Launch
Aiming to help data professionals and analytics engineers get use cases from development to production faster, ThoughtSpot also announces the following features:
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Integration with dbt – this allows analytics engineers to translate dbt models into TML (ThoughtSpot Modeling Language). With dbt, data models can collaborate on data modeling on the cloud data platform, then make those data models instantly available in ThoughtSpot.
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New SpotApps – includes various templates for transaction systems such as ServiceNow, Snowflake, HubSpot, Okta, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Jira, RedShift, and Databricks.
Commenting on the set of mergers, Nair said:
We give customers a different proposition compared to the buffet offered by other large cloud vendors, which is: you can go and build something very good, but underneath it we also give you an ecosystem advantage. There will be many APIs, many SDKs, and many joint products.
And Nair is particularly keen to highlight dbt integration, as he sees it as critical to how ThoughtSpot builds its ‘kill off BI dashboards’ mantra. He added:
This whole idea of headless BI is something we have been advocating since the beginning. This machine to machine conversation is as important as what machines do to people, about delivering insights. So one of the things we delivered was one of the first integration with dbt.
Dbt tries to build a central unified metric layer, so that the business can speak and the data that speaks can be bridged to one sheet. Our ability to point to a dbt project and then start searching, will also significantly narrow that space – not just for people, but also for machines. So when your people can’t determine how good the product or service is, the product and the machine should do that. That’s a new way of thinking. The old BI wouldn’t get here, because their endpoint was a dashboard report.
Rethinking pricing
This week, ThoughtSpot is also launching three new editions: Team Edition, Pro Edition and a special bundle for startups, nonprofits and educational institutions. As part of these editions, ThoughtSpot also announced a consumption -based pricing model, where customers simply pay for what they use.
ThoughtSpot customers can start with Team Edition for a flat fee of $ 95 per month for a user-group with unlimited users. The Pro Edition starts at $ 2500 per month for up to 5 user-groups with unlimited users. Pro Edition customers will only pay for what they consume, based on actual queries. Startups, nonprofits, and educational institutions with less than 100 people and less than $ 10M in annual revenue will have access to a flat fee offer for the Pro Edition, with charges per query that surrendered.
ThoughtSpot’s pricing changes are part of its transition to a truly cloud-based model, as well as enhancing ease of access for smaller teams and expanding ThoughtSpot’s reach. The average price of a deal on ThoughtSpot used to be $ 200,000 – now users in small teams can get access for as little as $ 95, Nair says. He added:
We are once again launching the whole pricing strategy with two basic principles behind it. Being the first, we need to make sure we turn off the shelfware. Enterprise software is a valued asset when it is leased. When it is purchased it is a depreciating asset.
If you want more, they will charge you more. As we continue to add software and capabilities that will automatically become available.
I really believe it’s important to take this archaic idea, of these standard user-based licenses, that aren’t tied to a pro-tem variant, that is overly exploitative, and remove it. In the cloud world, when customers are just renting, they should have complete clarity – they shouldn’t be paying for things unless they’re going to use it. And there will be peace of mind if people really use the heck of it. That’s what we actually do with these three models.
What I take
This seems like a more mature and sophisticated approach to getting into enterprise BI, from ThoughtSpot. There’s still the spice from Nair that wants to change things, but it now has an understanding of the realities of what business consumers need. Nair is not wrong in following an ecosystem approach. Its integration with dbt to take advantage of live machine data, and make that accessible, is particularly interesting. I have several customer interviews lined up in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for diginomica on how it all applies.
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