Business intelligence platform provider Domo Inc. announced a major platform update today at its Domopalooza 2021 virtual user conference, with enhanced embedded analytics capabilities, more multicloud proficiency and an expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. among the highlights.

The new capabilities in Domo Everywhere, the company’s hub of embedded analytics tools, are supposed to make it easier for its customer’s workers to get their hands on the data they need throughout their workflows, in order to aid their analytics-based decisions, the company said.

The new embedded analytics tools can be used from within the Domo Business Cloud or as an OEM feature, in conjunction with third-party tools, Domo said. The idea is to simplify data sharing, help customers monetize their data assets and increase governance of sensitive information.

Analyst Howard Dresner of Dresner Advisory Services said the new embedded analytics capabilities help to support and promote “information democracy” by making it easier for people to access insights exactly where they need them. “While our research shows that most organizations are prioritizing embedded analytics for better internal data participation, Domo’s new capabilities that highlight an opportunity for organizations to innovate and drive higher BI leverage across an entire ecosystem of customers, partners and suppliers can also be extremely valuable,” he added.

Domo’s new multicloud offering, meanwhile, is designed to help customers access their data more easily regardless of where it’s hosted. It now provides a single interface that provides access to data from multiple cloud platforms, without users needing to figure out where that information comes from or which tools they need to use to access it. The new capabilities are designed to overcome the challenges presented by data access and a lack of data agility, Domo said.

“Data is only useful if you can take action on it to improve business outcomes, and as organizations continue to invest in cloud for speed and flexibility, they must also invest in the technology to more effectively utilize the data in these cloud platforms,” said Ventana Research analyst Dave Menninger. “Domo’s approach, including its native integrations to Snowflake and Amazon Redshift, is designed to streamline the time-consuming processes of onboarding and managing data, helping IT leaders more efficiently serve the business with data.”

Domo’s expanded relationship with AWS enables easier access to more than 3,400 third-party data products from the AWS Data Exchange. The company has also created a new tool called Domo for Amazon Redshift, which is essentially a native integration between Domo’s platform and Amazon’s cloud warehouse service that makes data stored there more accessible and actionable. It comes just days after the company announced a similar integration with Snowflake Inc.’s popular cloud data warehouse service.

“The multicloud fabric is an expansion and improvement upon Domo’s prior federated data-access capabilities,” Constellation Research Inc. analyst Doug Henschen told SiliconANGLE. “Together with the Domo for Redshift and recent Domo for Snowflake announcements, they’re expanding the cloud deployment and cloud-data-access options, and Google BigQuery and Azure sources are on the roadmap.”

In a final announcement, Domo listed a host of new augmented intelligence capabilities within its platform that it said are aimed at reducing the technical barrier for decision makers that want to be more “data curious.”

The new features include Natural Language in Narrative Cards, which the company described as a “data storytelling tool” that executes complex analysis on data and generates narratives about it, so users without any data science experience can understand it better. The Dataset Views and Analyzer tool, meanwhile, is meant to guide business users through data exploration, visualization and analysis through a single interface,

Lastly, in a nod to the rising low-code trend, Domo announced a new feature called DDX Bricks that makes it possible to create and deploy customized data visualizations and business intelligence apps without writing any code.

Henschen’s colleague at Constellation Research, Holger Mueller, told SiliconANGLE that the hopes most enterprises would keep their data in a single cloud are long gone, and that the reality is that most firms have “data sprawl” across multiple cloud platforms, either by design or by accident. “Executives still need to know and see what is happening across their enterprise though, and Domo is waking up to that reality with its support for data in multiple clouds and different platforms,” the analyst said.

Still, Mueller warned that Domo and its rivals still have a long way to go: “It’s going to be interesting to see who will the race to deliver the best multi-cloud analytics services, but that is only half the race because the ‘action’ part of the ‘insight to action’ is even more complex, as transactional systems are equally dispersed across multiclouds,”

Domo said the new AI and BI capabilities in its platform are available now, while the multicloud capabilities will become available later in the year.

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