Looker Data Sciences, Inc. has pulled the curtains back on a new implementation of its popular business intelligence service that allows developers to embed select functionality into any website, portal or app. That opens up a convenient path into the era of data-driven applications that pundits have been predicting for the last few years.

The main reason that the vision has been slow to materialize so far is that building analytic capabilities is a major undertaking even for large organizations with established development operations. Powered by Looker, as the new embedded service is called, reduces that task to setting up an installation and hooking it up to the desired project.

The model offers numerous advantages over implementing business intelligence capabilities from scratch, starting with the most obvious benefit of drastically reducing the amount of coding that an organization’s developers have to perform on their own. That frees up time to work on other features, which in turn means that the final product ends up being delivered faster.

But the logistical benefits of taking such a major item off the development team’s checklist are still dwarfed by the impact on the business workers who ultimately benefit from the software. Looker’s service offers much a broader range of capabilities than what the typical organization can feasibly cobble together internally, which can help make the user experience that much better and help improve productivity in the process.

And that’s ultimately what embedded business intelligence is all about. As Karl Van den Berg of Jaspersoft Inc., one of the startup’s top competitors, explained to SiliconANGLE, providing analytics directly in the everyday applications where employees perform most of their work instead of a separate system with its own complexities can a go long way towards encouraging usage.

But the potential use cases don’t stop at the four walls of the organization. Looker says that one customer is leveraging its service to provide financial reporting in an online portal for personal investors, while another, an outfit called iFactor Consulting, is helping its utility clients provide similar visibility into household power consumption.

The applications that the service enables Looker to power level the playing field against the existing embedded analytics functionality from Jaspersoft and Birst Inc., another rival that recently landed $65 million in funding. The competition boasts a considerable head start, but the startup has $30 million in its own freshly raised capital to help make up for the lost time.