ThoughtSpot adds new BI capabilities, editions for smaller organizations

At its Beyond 2022 meeting yesterday, independent business intelligence (BI) player ThoughtSpot announced the key points of its revamped Modern Analytics Cloud platform, including new capabilities and new editions available for small, medium-sized teams entities and large enterprise organizations.

ThoughtSpot’s Series F roundraising, in November, garnered $ 100M and a $ 4.2 billion valuation for the company. The reset of appreciation was also accompanied by a change in the business model. While the platform premiered in the market with a monolithic, on-premises natural language-focused business intelligence platform and a six-figure price tag, ThoughtSpot has completely shifted gears, switched to a full and SaaS model.

Technology has changed along with the deployment model. While the original ThoughtSpot platform required all data to be ingested into, and modeled within its own storage platform, it now uses major data warehouse and lakehouse platforms – including Amazon Redshift, Snowflake , Databricks, Google BigQuery, Starburst, Dremio and Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics – for actual data storage.

In essence, ThoughtSpot is now implemented as an analytics engine, with its own modeling language, and no longer intended to be a physical repository for data. This avoids long data movements and inefficient, risky data duplication, using a customer-driven approach rather than a vendor-centric one.

New editions to its analytics platform

Yesterday’s announcement echoed further changes to the pricing model, making the ThoughtSpot analytics platform available in three editions, which differ in data volume/capacity limits, but do not impose restrictions on the number of users. . Team Edition is available for $ 95/month, with a data volume limit of 5 million rows. While there is no limit to the number of users, there is a limit of one rank of users, making the Team edition a solution to the department, with the appropriate nomenclature. Team Edition offers unlimited queries, and community-based support.

The Pro Edition starts at $ 2500/month, with a 100 million row limit-increasing both price and data capacity by approximately 20x-though the row: dollar ratio actually drops a bit. For Pro, the number of user groups increases from one to five, making it a solution more suitable for small and medium -sized organizations or as a division solution for larger organizations. ThoughtSpot’s 24/7 direct support is part of the package, with some specific service-level agreements (SLAs). The actual monthly billable amount for the Pro will vary according to query activity; however, startups, nonprofits and educational institutions, with less than 100 people and less than $ 10 million in annual revenue, qualify for a special Pro variant that eliminates charges per query.

The top-of-the-line solution is Enterprise Edition, which removes limits on the amount of data and the number of user groups. Here, too, pricing is based on actual queries, and capabilities include higher SLA levels, enhanced data encryption, support for AWS PrivateLink/Azure Private Link, single sign on (SSO) and VPN support.

ThoughtSpot offers many features

In addition to new editions and pricing, ThoughtSpot has announced several new key capabilities. These include the new “CodeSpot” searchable repository of ThoughtSpot’s open-source blocks and code samples; ELT Live Analytics templates (custom ELT jobs built to work with Matillion); new third-party data blocks; integration with dbt Labs ’SQL-based data pipeline platform, and new SpotApps, with templates for ServiceNow, Snowflake, HubSpot, Okta, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Jira, Redshift and Databricks.

ThoughtSpot Sync was also announced, which can trigger actions in other applications and services via APIs; Bring Your Own Charts, which allows customers to bring visualizations from the javascript or d3 library directly into ThoughtSpot’s Live Analytics interface; and Monitor, an automated KPI observation and alerting facility.

Compare and contrast

For my own purposes, I want to evaluate new offers associated with others in the market, both to determine value, but also to observe industry trends. Having three tiers of pricing for the ThoughtSpot platform, as well as its cloud orientation, calls for some comparisons to Microsoft’s Power BI. The latter also offers three main tiers: Free, Pro and Premium, with the latter of which starts at $ 4995/month and is aimed at businesses, similar to the Enterprise Edition of ThoughtSpot.

There are major differences, though. While Power BI Premium does not limit the number of users who only use consumption, it does have additional pricing per seat for users who require authoring skills. On the other hand, it offers dedicated infrastructure and does not have any usage-based fees. Of course, the higher the usage, the more computing capacity a customer might want, which would mean adding dedicated nodes to the infrastructure, with a corresponding increase in monthly pricing. One way or another, you get what you pay for, or vice versa.

Meanwhile, Power BI allows users to import data into their BI models or leave it in the source system. It also provides so-called compositie models, where data storage for a BI model can be split between local and remote.

Trend, not trend

The point here, however, is not to measure equality between ThoughtSpot and other BI platforms, but rather to identify some consensus trends in the market. What we see in general, is that business intelligence, which has existed since the 1990s, retains its basic principles of slice-and-dice analytics but has been modernized with sea changes in database technology and general computing. Now, it’s all about the cloud, integration with other platforms in the ecosystem, and using data from a variety of sources, without the need to transfer data.

Admission barriers for BI have been lowered, with simplified start-up experiences, and very accessible pricing for smaller organizations. Large organizations will still pay a lot, but will see very good ROI, in terms of operational efficiency and competitive differentiation. The doctrine of data-driven operation and digital transformation is enabled by BI, which needs to be low-friction and accessible in the low-end, while facilitating great rewards, often accompanied by equally stable pricing, in the high-end .

ThoughtSpot and its platform have changed drastically since the early seasons, as has the BI space, with so many players acquired over the past few years. ThoughtSpot is now well aligned with industry trends and seems to be driven by them. If the remaining independents like ThoughtSpot are to succeed, they will need to follow these trends and they will be even ahead. Some will do good there; others are less. ThoughtSpot is clearly all-in on reorganizing and tweaking for today’s analytics workloads, despite the evolution of the business intelligence market in a very crowded, competitive space.

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