Logi Analytics Doubles Down On Embedded Data Analytics With New ‘Composer’

Company says building business intelligence capabilities directly into applications, rather than using stand-alone BI tools, is the way to bring data analytics to business users.

Logi Analytics is doubling down on its focus on embedded analytics, unveiling this week a new software development team platform that ISVs and corporate developers can use to build business analytical functionality directly into commercial and enterprise applications.

The new Logi Composer development system is the company’s latest move to champion the concept of embedding business analytics within operational applications and workflows as an alternative to using traditional stand-alone business intelligence tools.

‘We feel we have finally cracked the code of delivering embedded, self-service business analytics capabilities that can be tailored and configured to match user skill levels and allow then to modify and share data visualizations,” said Kevin Greene, chief operating officer at McLean, Va.-based Logi Analytics, in an interview with CRN.

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Business intelligence tools have traditionally been designed for – and used by – experienced analysts who collect data from operational systems and provide analytical results to executives and information workers through reports and dashboards. Business intelligence tool vendors have long sought ways to tailor their software to make it more usable by workers who generally lack programming or analytical experience.

Logi Analytics is pursuing the alternative approach of building business analytics capabilities directly into corporate applications, such as CRM, marketing or manufacturing systems, making those capabilities available to a wider range of users. While Logi Analytics has always provided embedded analytics tools, Greene said the company has decided in recent years to make embedded analytics its core focus.

That decision led to the development of Logi Composer, an out-of-the-box development platform that software development teams use to design, build and embed interactive dashboards and data visualizations into commercial and in-house custom applications, complete with connections to popular data sources that underlie the applications. Such built-in functionality empowers users to explore, analyze and share data and analytical results on a “self-service” basis.

Developers and DevOps teams today are often tasked with coding intellectual property within a company’s software – whether it’s a commercial application from an ISV or an application developed in-house by a business, Greene said.

“I think a lot of ISVs are just waking up to the fact that their mission in life has changed,” he said, noting the increased demand from application users for access to underlying data and analytics. “I think some ISVs are ahead of the game. Others are just starting their analytics journey.”

Logi Composer incorporates the Smart Data Connectors technology that Logi Analytics acquired when it bought Zoomdata in June 2019. Those technologies powers Logi Composer’s back-end query processing and its ability to connect to a wide range of data sources. Logi Composer also incorporates a cloud-ready microservices architecture that provides the platform with scalability.

QAD, a Santa Barbara, Calif., developer of manufacturing ERP applications, is an ISV partner that is using Logi Composer to embed decision making intelligence into its software. That capability allows users to access and share data analysis insights without leaving the application to use a separate BI tool, QAD CTO Tony Winter said in a statement.

Today about 70 percent of Logi Analytics’ revenue is generated through OEM partners like QAD, according to Greene, while sales for in-house custom development are a small, but growing part of the vendor’s business.

Logi Composer is available as a stand-alone tool or as part of the Logi Symphony subscription-based service that provides access to all of the vendor’s products.