Almost every business, whether it is an emerging SaaS startup or a traditional enterprise, engages with customers primarily through some kind of app. And that is what gives the end user the first impression of the organization.

The problem is that this interface is often a static dashboard that allows almost no interaction with customers. Turning apps in a delightful, engaging experience for end users is the goal of ThoughtSpot Everywhere, a product from unicorn startup ThoughtSpot Inc., a business intelligence platform that helps enterprises explore, analyze and share real-time analytics data with ease, according to Victor Chang (pictured), vice president of ThoughtSpot Everywhere and corporate development at ThoughtSpot.

“If you are an application company … if you’re hotel management, if you’re a productivity application, analytics is not typically your strong suit,” Chang said. “Where ThoughtSpot Everywhere comes in is, instead of you having to build your own analytics and interactivity experience with the data, ThoughtSpot Everywhere helps deliver a really self-service, interactive experience and transform your application into a data application.”

Chang spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed how digital transformation has scaled up and spread out applications that store and process data, how businesses have struggled to make their apps more attractive to customers, and how ThoughtSpot Everywhere can guide them in this process. (* Disclosure below.)

Sharpening customers’ curiosity

While digital transformation has shaped companies into data-based organizations, there are still many gaps when it comes to using this data to create value for the business itself and for customers. Even when trying to provide analytics, most organizations’ apps today just deliver a static representation of some data, some answers and some insights that are created by someone else, according to Chang.

“When you go to your banking application, they usually show some pretty charts for you and then it sparks your curiosity about your credit card transactions or your banking transactions over the last month,” he said. “Naturally, usually for me, I would then want to click in and ask the next question: Which transactions fall into this category, what time, change the categories a bit, [but] usually you’re stuck.”

The challenge here is that if you wet the consumer’s appetite and do not satisfy it, you are likely to make them leave the app. So, by applying analytics, ThoughtSpot promises to replace passive dashboards with a modern, intuitive search experience that keeps users coming back for more.

“Going back to my example, if it’s in your banking app, you see some kind of visualization around expense actions and you can dig in. What about last month? What about last week? Which transactions? Which merchant?” Chang explained. “You can continue your curiosity journey so that the business user and the app user ask their questions instead of an analyst who’s sitting in the company behind a desk kind of asking your questions for you.”

Platform makes developers’ work easier

Businesses and developers who find out they need to frame more interactive apps often have two options. The first is to build their own analytics, which means hiring talent and making great investments in a process that can be difficult and expensive. The second is to buy the solution.

The market has plenty of vendors that offer embedded analytics options, but the paradigm is still developing those static visualizations of insights, according to Chang.

“If you really want to engage your users, today it’s all about self-services, it’s all about interactivity, and only ThoughtSpot’s data architecture can deliver that embedded in a data app for you,” he added.

Another advantage of ThoughtSpot Everywhere is that it was built to make the developer experience delightful. Designed with a modern API-driven architecture from the start, ThoughtSpot has invested a lot of time in creating a seamless developer SDK, easy-to-use REST APIs, and an interactive portal to make this development experience simpler.

The platform is also low-code and allows developers and product leaders to incorporate any service available in the Modern Analytics Cloud, including search and AI-driven analytics, directly into their apps, products and services.

“If you’re a developer, now you really can get from zero to an easy app for ThoughtSpot embedded in your data app in … often less than 60 minutes,” Chang stated.

Aiming to serve all-sized companies, from small cloud startups to large companies that have applications everywhere, the platform has very flexible pricing models, Chang pointed out. Customer consumption can start small and grow as users start using the services in a kind of “let us prove it to you” process.

“The great thing about the cloud is it does blur the lines between goals. Everyone can do a little bit of everything, and everyone can access a little bit more of their data and get more value out of it,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosure: ThoughtSpot Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither ThoughtSpot nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE