Getting the right answers using data analytics can be a daunting task. What if the result could be generated in seconds by asking precisely the right question, much like a Google search?

Data analytics provider ThoughtSpot Inc. has built a $1.95 billion business by offering exactly this kind of solution. The company’s chief executive officer, Sudheesh Nair, has even suggested a few sample queries that can be quickly answered by the company’s data analytics engine: “Is my cheapest vendor also my highest quality vendor? What’s the impact of Canadian crude oil price on my portfolio? What other question should I have asked but I didn’t?”

ThoughtSpot’s approach represents an important shift in the evolution of the analytics stack. The era of enterprise business intelligence, with information stored in data centers, has transformed into self-service and is rapidly moving into a new paradigm where data will become fully democratized, with most of it residing in cloud-based data repositories.

“Every customer interaction I have as CEO of ThoughtSpot is an opportunity to learn about business transformation,” said Nair in a post about the company last year. “In one meeting, I’m learning about how data is transforming a mom-and-pop restaurant business, while at the very next meeting I’m learning about the supply chain seasonality challenges of a global toy business. What we’re building at ThoughtSpot is at the center of all these, which is very exciting.”

ThoughtSpot will hold its “Thought.Leaders 2020” virtual event on October 15, bringing together visionary speakers, industry experts and business executives to discuss the latest technologies for analyzing vast amounts of data. The online gathering and discussion will focus on the importance of creating a data-driven culture, achieving granular insights by leveraging the full capabilities of artificial intelligence, and pursuing new ways to unlock value in cloud data warehouses. (* Disclosure below.)

Search and AI-driven

ThoughtSpot’s data search solutions are part of a market defined by Gartner and others as “augmented analytics,” which adds AI and natural language processing technologies to accelerate data-driven solutions. ThoughtSpot prefers to call this “search-driven analytics,” and the future overall market is robust. Grand View Research Inc. predicts growth of the augmented analytics space to reach $22.4 billion by 2025.

ThoughtSpot’s solution is based on technology that translates a search question into structured query language or SQL. This generates the required data, and then AI is applied to understand intent, resulting in a precise, correct answer, delivered instantaneously.

“The bar on delivering that kind of answer is very high, and because of that, understanding intent is critical,” said Nair during an interview in 2019. “There’s a lot of AI that goes behind it to understand the intent.”

The firm’s AI-based solution could go a long way toward addressing a larger problem in the enterprise world: Many companies are unhappy about the current state of data analytics. New research from ThoughtSpot and TDWI has found that two-thirds of organizations fail to deliver business impact through investment in analytics. The report, which surveyed 430 data and analytics professionals across six industry sectors in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, also found that business analysts were spending a disproportionate amount of time building reports or dashboards and were not focused enough on insights from the data itself.

Fostering data-powered culture

These survey results point toward a key element in ThoughtSpot’s strategy: Company culture is one of the most important pillars for a data-driven approach. This means that generating the right answers from data is only half the battle. It’s the insights, time and a willingness to act on those insights that can make a major difference in a data analytics strategy.

“When it comes to fostering an organizational culture of data-driven decision making, having all of the best technology in the world will only get you so far,” said Cindi Howson, chief data strategy officer for ThoughtSpot, in a blog post for Information Management. “What’s truly needed is an open, transparent environment where data literacy is the norm, goals and incentives are properly aligned, and everyone plays a role in using data to improve business and the world.”

For its part, ThoughSpot has pursued an aggressive strategy in 2020 to strengthen available options for companies seeking to implement an effective data analytics approach. In early September, the company announced the release of 6.2, the latest version of its platform. New features included Answer Explorer 2.0, which leverages AI to guide users toward unasked questions and new insights.

That release was followed two weeks later by the launch of ThoughtSpot Cloud, a software-as-a-service platform for search and AI-driven analytics that links to enterprise cloud data sources, such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. The new cloud-based offering provides ThoughtSpot’s platform as a fully managed service with reusable low code templates to simplify obtaining insights from applications.

ThoughtSpot has also been expanding its industry partnerships. The company announced a collaboration with Google Cloud in March that included the launch of a tool that can run search and AI-powered analytics in BigQuery without having to move or cache data. ThoughtSpot also formed a partnership with VoiceBase Inc. in July to generate insight from voice data by leveraging advanced search capabilities.

Prior to the business disruption caused by the global pandemic, ThoughtSpot appeared headed down the path of an initial public offering. The company hired its first chief financial officer in January, and a record-breaking software company IPO for cloud data warehouse vendor Snowflake Inc. has generated additional speculation around ThoughtSpot’s plans.

However, recent reports have indicated that the company may push its IPO plans into 2021. Nair was previously president of Nutanix Inc., which went public under his watch in 2016.

“I’m not going to be coy about it,” said Nair in an interview in September. “It’s a high bar to take a software company in this space public, but this company has the leadership, the market, the structure and the growth so far.”

Livestream of Thought.Leaders 2020

Thought.Leaders 2020 is a livestream event. You can register for free here to access the live event. We offer you various ways to watch Thought.Leaders 2020, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Thought.Leaders 2020. Neither ThoughtSpot Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: ThoughtSpot