LAS VEGAS – ThoughtSpot on Tuesday announced the latest update to the analytics platform, featuring new application templates and automation capabilities.
In addition, the vendor has launched new pricing models aimed at enabling small and medium-sized businesses to make analytics part of their decision-making process., and added a lot of integration with partners.
The new capabilities were announced in Beyond 2022. This is the first user conference in person since November 2019, after it conducted virtual user conferences over the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., Last updated its platform-called Modern Analytics Cloud-in November 2021.
After previously targeting an audience of business users and spending a large portion of last year on rebuilding its platform to make it cloud-first, the vendor released Data Workspace. The new release is an environment for data analysts, engineers, and developers that allows them to build and operate interactive, real-time analytics assets.
ThoughtSpot’s latest Modern Analytics Cloud update is not aimed at a specific persona, but at an effort to give every employee within an organization the tools to work with data, according to the vendor.
Meanwhile, Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research, said the vendor’s latest update, along with its embrace of the cloud and the addition of modern capabilities such as embedded analytics, shows that the ThoughtSpot platform is competitive to other analytics vendors.
“ThinkSpot has changed its delivery model in recent years to embrace rapid cloud deployment, and now it is leveraging integration, embedding and automation options, while also opening up new subscription model, ”Henschen said. “You can’t blame ThoughtSpot for the lack of effort.”
If ThoughtSpot has a problem, however, many large vendors have gone cloud-first and added many of the same capabilities, Henschen said.
“The company opposes the strengthened efforts of larger, incumbent vendors to make insights more actionable and widely accessible in the context of day-to-day work,” he said.
New capabilities
ThoughtSpot first introduced SpotApps in November 2021. SpotApps are prebuilt analytics applications for specific third-party workplace applications that allow customers to quickly deploy analytics applications. with a few clicks and get value from the data collected by their workplace applications.
Initial SpotApps include applications for HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Snowflake.
New SpotApps launched on Tuesday include applications for Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Analytics, Atlassian’s Jira and Okta.
In addition to the introduction of the new SpotApps, the vendor released ThoughtSpot Sync and Monitor to add automation capabilities.
Sync allows users to automatically trigger actions on applications and services through application program interfaces, while Monitor automatically alerts users to changes to their key indicators. of performance when they occur.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
“I’m most intrigued by SpotApp, Sync and Monitor announcements,” Henschen said. “SpotApps provides more ways to speed up appreciation time, Sync is about using analytics to trigger automated actions through APIs, and Monitor is about automating action and delivery of insights-a real-time push model rather than requiring busy people to actively take action. keep an eye out and explore important changes. “
Meanwhile, Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy, spoke of the importance of new integrations and connecting ThoughtSpot partners.
The latest update to Modern Analytics Cloud includes:
- integrations with AWS Redshift Serverless to run on AWS without having to provide and manage data warehouse clusters, Snowflake Data Marketplace to gain insights from third-party data in Snowflake, and Databricks to provide users with data lakehouse vendors the ability to launch a free trial of ThoughtSpot from the Databricks console;
- connectors to data lakehouse vendor Dremio and data lake query vendor Starburst to enable users to take advantage of a variety of architectures, including data mesh and data lakes; at
- an integration with data transformation vendor Dbt Labs for engineers to translate dbt models into ThoughtSpot Modeling Language (TML) and more easily model data.
“The most important thing here is to focus on partner integrations,” Farmer said. “That takes a lot of commitment and work, not just from engineering but from team and marketing partners, as well as the work needed to get support and sales quickly.”
He added that ThoughtSpot has previously added capabilities through partnerships, but it is nonetheless significant.
“Some of these integrations are lightweight connectors that more or less check a box for compatibility, but others involve significant engineering and allow specific partners in architectures or solutions. – note the mergers with Matillion and Dbt Labs, in particular, “Farmer continued.
In addition to new application templates, automation capabilities and added integrations, the ThoughtSpot Modern Analytics Cloud update includes:
- the launch of CodeSpot, a searchable library of open source ThoughtSpot blocks, code samples and best practices available to developers to speed up the process of developing applications and embedding analytics;
- third-party data blocks built using TML that allow customers to use external data to enrich their own data;
- extract, load, and transform (ELT) templates built to work with ThoughtSpot’s SpotApps and ELT vendor Matillion so that joint customers can quickly launch jobs between ThoughtSpot and the cloud data warehouses using Matillion; at
- the introduction of Bring Your Own Charts to allow users to import visualizations from JavaScript or D3 libraries into ThoughtSpot.
“ThinkSpot is at the top of key market dynamics,” Henschen said. “It strengthens integrations with hot vendors including AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, Matillion and Dbt Labs, and its CodeSpot and SpotApps announcements are about speeding up the time to give value,” Henschen said. “The challenge is that top BI/analytics incumbents are also heading in the same direction.”
Therefore, to attract new customers rather than just serve the needs of current customers, differentiation is key for ThoughtSpot. This is what happened when the vendor was a startup and was among the first to adopt augmented analytics capabilities-such as natural query language-that have become more standard now.
“Prospective customers want evidence that ThoughtSpot is better at making insights accessible and actionable in a cost-effective way,” Henschen added.
Similarly, Farmer said that now that other vendors are adding some of the same capabilities that varied to ThoughtSpot earlier, the company needs to find new ways of competing with established vendors. And the capabilities it continues to add through product development and more recently will help its first two acquisitions.
“I think we’ll see ThoughtSpot getting more attention and success now that the initial hype is done,” he said. “The next wave for them will be more realistically positioned and more realistically measurable by the industry.”
New editions
In addition to adding new capabilities, ThoughtSpot has released three new editions of its Modern Analytics Cloud aimed at enabling small businesses and individuals to use the vendor platform in addition to the businesses the vendor has delivered historically.
Everything is now available in general.
ThoughtSpot does not make pricing for its analytics tools public, but it has announced the cost for its Team Edition, Pro Edition and special Pro Edition versions for startups, nonprofits and educational institutions with less than 100 people and less than $ 10 million in annual revenue.
Team Edition is available for a flat fee of $ 95 per month for a group of users with an unlimited number of users.
The Pro Edition starts at $ 2,500 per month for up to five user groups with an unlimited number of users within those groups, but users may be charged more based on consumption. The special Pro Edition version, however, is available for a flat fee of $ 2,500 per month without being subject to any additional costs based on consumption.
“New pricing models are always important, and it’s clear that ThoughtSpot is becoming aggressive with … specifically, consumption -based pricing options,” Henschen said. “They’re looking for more ways to get their foot in the door and remove purchase objections.”