DIY Analytics Hub: Save Time & Drive ROI

Transcript
All right. Thank you everyone for joining today. Very grateful for you spending a little bit of your time with us today, especially thankful for those who joined on time. We're really appreciative of that. Hopefully, those that were five minutes early were able to go get a coffee or anything that they needed. But this is the latest in a series of webinars by InterWorks. If you don't know who InterWorks is, we are a people-focused tech consultancy where we spend a long time working with our clients to make sure that they are given the best customized collaborative solutions in terms of what the market can bring. If we're looking at our story itself, I said a long time. I guess we're not that old. We were started in 1996, some friends out of OSU where we're still headquartered today in Stillwater, Oklahoma. We have expanded globally ever since from a regional IT player to a global BI solution provider, and it's been a very fun journey to go through. As we've expanded out from literally running wires through ceilings, we've actually expanded to then have an analytics practice, an experience practice, a data practice, enablement and solutions across the entire suite of business. Our goal is to make sure that you are able to meet your data wherever it is. So whether that means standing up some new data infrastructure, whether that means using BI tools to get access to it easier, really the goal is to help people meet tech and get the most out of that investment that you've made there. Here's a few of our clients we like to call out, people we enjoy working with, some we're currently working with, some we worked with in the past. It's always nice to see my alma mater up here, University of Oxford that's there. But really, we do everything from the smallest of small to the biggest of big. Our longest-standing client is a mom-and-pop dentist shop right next door in Stillwater, and we're proud of the fact that they still trust us years later. From a partnership perspective at InterWorks, we are a best-of-breed shop. We'll talk about this in our presentation today, but our goal is matching the right tool to the right job. And because of that, we have a broad variety of partners that we work with. We have Tableau, been a Gold Partner with them for years. We have Snowflake, our preferred database underlying all of our technologies in the cloud data warehouse movement. But then we also work with other tools like Fivetran, ThoughtSpot, DataIku. We have AWS and Microsoft up there. And then for our hardware side of the house, we use Dell. Our goal, again, is to make sure that we match the right situation with the right tool to make it as successful as possible. All of this is done under the mantra of doing the best work with the best clients with the best people. And so those are our guiding principles. We use those to try and help people be the most successful as they can be with their data and analytics. But for today, what we're talking about is a do-it-yourself analytics hub. The goal here is to save time and drive ROI for those analytics investments that you've made. As a quick hello real fast, the wonderful emcee who is starting things off is Ben Bausili. Joining me is our global director of product. I sneakily grabbed a headshot from like six years ago in effort to make me potentially look older than someone. I don't think it worked. I'm Ben Young. I've got a baby face, and it just is there. But I'm our regional director for the east half of the US. I spend a lot of time working with our major account relationships, talking about BI strategy and positioning and working with those partners. Now, in that, I get exposed to a lot of different groups and a lot of different work that's going on to try and make BI be successful. And in general, BI is a mature market at this point. What started as a fringe movement a few years ago, kind of dated to the people, was Tableau's early mantra back in 2007 when it was going live, no longer needs to be validated by the market. We have a couple of headline acquisitions of Tableau and Looker measured in the billions, but then we still have a vibrant economy where ThoughtSpot is a recent partner of ours, where they've reached unicorn status, $248 million to then have an over-billion-dollar valuation. So the idea here is there is lots of money in BI. It's not going away despite the fact that BI is actually pretty difficult. So for all of its maturity as a market, BI is hard. Analytics projects have an eighty percent failure rate. This is a prediction from Gartner and has proved out time and again that through 2022, I would say into 2023, only twenty percent of analytics insights will actually deliver business outcomes. Now there's a lot of reasons why this happens. I'm not blaming it on any particular tool. Across our work and our bench of clients, there's really a whole series of answers we could talk about here. We could talk enablement. We could talk user adoption. There's a lot of different ways we could poke at things. But one of the reasons that we run into a lot of challenges with a lot of our BI work harkens back to an old adage. So if you're given a hammer, those of you who have seen this before, Abraham Maslow's mid-sixties, there's some debate around who said it first or who exactly came up with this style of quote. But if you want, there's a quote investigator link at the bottom you can look at. But I suppose it's tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer to treat everything as if it were a nail. So what we're running into here is when we roll out BI projects, we tend to invest in a single platform at a time. And we tend to say, great, I now have XYZ tool, therefore it's going to solve all of my problems. This is the hammer theory. You could also call it the religion theory if you want. I have fill-in-the-blank tool. What's the question? Doesn't matter. That's going to be the answer. I chose Tableau. I chose Power BI. I chose ThoughtSpot. That's going to solve all of my problems. Now the thing is, when you're given a hammer, you usually have somebody who is saying, I need you to solve this specific problem. And if it's a nail, that works great. There's a connection here between what's being asked and the tool that you have. If you want to build a house though, if we're looking at this basic drawing that we have here, then you're going to need some more tools on top of that. There is no successful painter that I know who's going to be able to do a good job with a hammer. They're going to need to be able to go through and use their own specialized tools to make that happen. Because if you give them a hammer, then you end up in this scenario where you don't have people using it. Right? So pushing this analogy a little bit more, going into the homeownership standpoint, if we're trying to have somebody fix a sink, a hammer maybe will help in limited situations or can get somebody part of the way, but it's actually better for them to have their own tool, which is where you end up with the best-of-breed strategy. Now we're going to toss a quick poll up on the screen. Just curious what tools people are using today who've joined us on this webinar. But the whole theory behind best-of-breed is the idea that you are going to meet people where they are. You're going to help people get to the analyses that they need in the way that it makes sense. For some people, Tableau is the best thing they've ever gotten in contact with. I remember when I was first introduced to Tableau almost a decade ago. I loved it. It changed the way that I did my work. But just because it did that for me doesn't mean that Power BI can't do that for somebody else. It doesn't mean that ThoughtSpot can't fill that gap for self-service analytics for somebody else. The point is we have multivariate factors that are in here, but we really just have different preferences for different people. Some people want to grab a wrench and work on the sink, and that's fine. Some people want to spend their time painting. Some people want to spend their time hammering. Not really an issue in terms of which choice that is there, except that it leads to a new problem. Right? So we've got a mix of users here where vast majority of people are using Tableau, but we also have ThoughtSpot users here. We have Power BI users, and we even have a Looker user who's here. There's some others that are thrown around in there. Odds are there's some maybe legacy tools running around or just a new one that we haven't heard of. Always happy to chat through those as needed. But the problem is when you move towards best-of-breed, you're basically coming in and saying, hey. We accept that I'm going to be supporting multiple platforms, which is great for our users on the right hand of the screen. For the people who want to choose what they have, everything's good to go. For the people requesting though, we run into a challenge. They're saying I want analytics. Okay, what does analytics mean? Maybe it's a dashboard. Maybe it's a ThoughtSpot live board. Maybe it's a ThoughtSpot search. Maybe it's Power BI's Q&A. What do you mean by analytics? And then all of a sudden, we're causing confusion. We're making it so we're not able to understand what is the narrative that's out there, and it's really getting in the way of getting any return on the investment we've made in those BI tools. This gets even more complex when you are asking non-technical people to make the choice between these. So a lot of times someone's saying, I just want the answer. I don't really care how you get it. And then they're getting hit with the question of, okay, well, do you want that through Tableau? You want that through ThoughtSpot? Is that a Dataiku question? Is that a website you need us to build? And the question is, I don't know. Right? It's not really an issue. But the question is when you have multiple in the same place, all of a sudden you potentially have multiple sources of truth. So you have a dual-pronged problem of tool selection. How do I know which one is the right one? And then distribution. How do I know what is the right answer? And what is not something that someone's just working on? Now in terms of tool selection, that one, to be honest, is a little bit easier. Right? So we spend a lot of time trying to figure out where self-service lives as an industry. And we're not going to dive deep into this one today, but if you want to have a conversation around this, at InterWorks, this is our two-by-two of how we position different tools, splitting it between object creation and consumption, working between a professional who it's their day job, and this citizen developer, someone who is not an analyst professional but still wants to use data. I bring this up because, one, it's fascinating. I like looking at it and working through it. But two, just to say and point out the narrative that users are going to find the tool that works. It's an almost Darwinian standpoint here where no matter how many hard rules you put in place, someone will always find budget to buy the tool that they're interested in. And so for all of our clients that I work with on a regular basis, they have multiple tools. It just happens. It's a natural outgrowth and speaks to the validity of the best-of-breed approach because you're going to have more than one thing. So tool selection, to be honest, isn't as big a problem because they're already out there in the wild. You're going to be doing that. It's really a job of orienteering to point people towards the right tool that's there. Distribution, on the other hand, is a major challenge. Because as soon as you start pushing lots of tools out there, as soon as you start getting to a scenario where people have multiple places that they can go, you run into challenges of volume and flexibility. Now I can call this the Netflix model or the Double T Diner model. Both analogies work, so I'll run through both of them. The Netflix model is when you're sitting there. I have three girls all under the age of nine at home, so we're tired at the end of the day. Ben, I think you actually have more kids than me, and so you're even more tired than I am at the end of the day. But you get to Netflix and you're like, okay, I'll just watch something. It's a content aggregator. I want to find something. And you end up scrolling. Maybe you're on a laptop looking through something. Your spouse is next to you looking through on her phone, trying to find something. You don't know. There's too much stuff. You don't know what you want to watch. And so you end up at this point where you're like, I just give up. And then you go over to Disney Plus and watch Bluey or something similar. Right? The other similar model is Double T Diner. This is near me. I live in Maryland. There's a great chain of Double T Diner, 1950s-style diner you can go in and eat at. Their menu though for the longest time was about fifteen pages of size eight font. Some pictures, but majority text. It was too hard to find anything. So every time I went, I ended up ordering the same thing because it was the only thing that I knew. In the context of BI tools, I took the Excel route. Like, look, there's too much stuff here. I don't know what's happening. I'm just going to open it up in Excel and run with that. That's fine. Right? It's not a bad thing. There's flaws with the Excel method, especially in terms of governance and scalability and things like that. But we can talk about different rules that are there, but really what we're trying to do is we're trying to drive a return on our investment, which is people actually using the tools. Now, this is not an unknown challenge. So this is something that all of our clients run into and often is a source of frustration for them. And the teams are working on it. They're trying to figure out what they can do. And usually, they end up in some valiant attempt here where they try and draw a box around all the different tools that exist and then have them be presented in some way. This could be a shared Teams channel where you're sending out links to, oh, you're interested in revenue? Okay, that's a ThoughtSpot report. Oh, you're interested in supply chain? That's Tableau. You're interested in finance, that was actually Power BI because they're big fans of DAX over there. Right? And they go through that and you'd have to navigate and point people in the right direction. SharePoint is a similar attempt. You can embed a lot of these tools and you'll see some basic embedding going on. Or at worst, and this actually happens a lot, you have some poor IT administrator who has a OneNote page with links out to everything. So if something breaks, the first question is, okay, what report is it? What workspace is it in? What project is it in? I'll go in and try and take care of it, and you just end up with a very difficult situation trying to maintain all of this. And so you end in a scenario where your BI team is frustrated. They're forced to work on something they're not supposed to be doing. It's content moderation and trying to embed that and do some presentation, maybe dabble in some web dev, something like that, trying to build out this hub and this single source of truth. But the fact that we're coming in with a best-of-breed strategy makes that job significantly more difficult. And that has real-world cost to it. So the challenge here is that frustration will grow in working with that. Trying to figure out where the right answer is is going to cost a lot of money because somebody has to maintain that list. Somebody has to figure out what the right answer is, and you end up having that being pushed. This is also the time factor on that. When somebody wants to get an answer and they don't know where to go, they could bounce between three different systems before they get to the final answer of, hey, this is the number or this is the verified source of truth that I should care about. And as you're asking people to either spend money for new tools or spend their time, the other scarce resource, adoption plummets. Your ROI tanks because you're not having people use your tools. What instead you're having is people fumbling around in the dark trying to find what they need, which then leads to that challenge. So this is a scenario where a lot of our clients land and then come to us and say, can we get some help? Which is actually where our DIY Analytics Hub Curator came from. I can talk to you a little bit about the background there, but I actually want to pass the mic over to Ben. Ben has been with InterWorks for longer than me actually, but since Curator was not even a thing yet. So Ben, want to talk a little bit about the background there? I think your perspective is so cool on it. Well, thanks. You keep making references to how old I am. I mean, I don't know how to take that, man. Respect. Respect for my elders. How's that sound? Sounds good. Yeah. So Curator is like a lot of things at InterWorks, which happened organically. You know, we send our best people out, and they get to work with some really cool clients who have some good ideas. And that usually involves us pushing boundaries. We've done lots of things with Tableau over the years, pushing its boundaries and discovering that we could use Tableau's embedded capabilities to do even more was the thing that unlocked Curator. And so a lot of the early things we were solving were things where we needed to mix and match. Sometimes it was, we need to do data write-back, or we need to have an Excel thing sit next to Curator, or we need to bring additional context, data tools, data dictionaries, things like that. And then other times it was more ambitious people wanting to have pride. We are a team who is excited about the work we're doing, we're going to brand it and stylize it and make it look great and embedded gives us that control. And the bottom line is that Curator was developed to give us that control over the entire experience. We have these great tools like Tableau or ThoughtSpot or Qlik or Power BI that give us the power to make a dashboard and have a lot of cool features. But they don't give us the power around those dashboards and how we deliver them, how we present them. And so Curator was something we were building as ad hoc websites over and over again. We're like, hey, this should be a thing. You know, and so we productized it. And we have clients doing really, really neat things with it, doing custom load screens, creating tutorials, leading up into more complicated dashboards, letting their analysts record videos explaining the context and use case for a dashboard to provide that extra level of effort. And yes, bringing all their tools together so that people have that one pane of glass across their solutions and people are able to access it easier. But the key thing is really just giving those controls, that control over the navigation, over the landing pages, over the ways that people experience and interact with the analytics content. That's awesome. Thanks, Ben. And I think it's been a lot of fun to be along for that ride too as I've been in the last five and a half years or so. What has been interesting to watch is as BI as a market has matured, there's been a broader push towards embedded plays specifically, which is distributing your BI tools inside of other websites or inside of maybe internal portals that you have. But really from a technology perspective, you've seen the growth of APIs where legacy players have been integrating more and more APIs into their tools, and then cloud-native players start with a massive suite of APIs. That is the new language that ties everything together. And what we do with Curator is we maintain those connections on top of that to allow for your end user, that poor overworked BI team, to be able to maintain this analytics hub and present that content they spend a long time working on. So when we talk about building out an analytics hub, it really is a build-versus-buy scenario. We have clients who do both. It is not a hard requirement to be an InterWorks client that you have to buy Curator. But typically the pattern that we've seen is you have either a team of web developers who are able to be dedicated to this tool, who are able to maintain the API connections to Tableau, Power BI, ThoughtSpot, make sure that everything is connected up and good to go, and then be able to build and maintain that hub going forward. Or they can outsource that and have Ben and his team who maintain Curator act as that accelerator. The typical runway that we see for building out your own hub is about six months. That's not because it's not a priority, and it's not because there's no talent from the development team. In fact, I've seen some really good ones that have been built. But what it required was a dedicated project, a dedicated series of sprints to go through, and a large investment in terms of scarce web dev resources to make that happen. And then you end up with a really good product, but you then have to have ongoing maintenance of that going forward. So that's the build side of the coin, and that's great. And again, APIs are becoming more and more native, treated as first-class citizens with all these BI tools we've been talking about, so that is a great approach. Curator is a way to say, you know what? My dev talent is scarce, so I want to have my non-technical users be able to build this out. The two-plus weeks you see in there is really around setup cost. There is usually a lightweight web server that hosts Curator for you, but we can even host that for you if you want a SaaS-like experience. But what we're going to do now actually is not have you just believe what I'm saying here, but we want to go in and show you what this process looks like of building out your own analytics hub. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop out of PowerPoint for a little bit. You'll see my wife and kids popping up there for a second. Then Ben, can you just give me a thumbs up? Can you see the Chrome window that we're looking at? Yep, we got it. Perfect. Thank you very much. So what we've got here is the exact scenario that's been set up to mimic a lot of what our clients go through. We have a Tableau environment, Tableau branding there at the top, very familiar, a safety blanket for me. I know this area well. This is where I can go and I can find my exact dashboard that I'm interested in. I've got the full interactivity that I'm used to. I can go in and see the filtering, the highlighting. It's great. I have this dashboard. I know if I want my customer analysis, I'm good to go here. At the same time, we're going to go over to ThoughtSpot. And then inside of there, we have a live board that we can look at, which is also showing a series of KPIs for this InterBurger. It's a fake company, fake restaurant chain that InterWorks owns, and we're able to run around and play with again, same interactivity, got that experience. I can then go over to Power BI and you can pull up different reports that are available. This is just a sample one that comes with Power BI. Didn't want to put any of our company data up. But the point is what we have here is three different answers, quotes around it, three different analyses that we want people to have access to and be able to experience. If you look between the three of these, we've got the information that's being presented, but each one looks like its own thing. I can tell that this is a ThoughtSpot experience. It's got the ThoughtSpot logo. It's got the menus. Same thing on Power BI. Got all the different capabilities that are available. The Power BI branding, nice and slick. Same thing with Tableau. Very clean, modern feel that's there. Got your different capabilities and things that are possible. Now I remember where all these things are, but I want to bring them together. And on top of that, I want to make it look like InterWorks. Right? So this is just the InterWorks homepage that we've got. And what I want to do is create something that doesn't necessarily look like the same headers that are here. I don't want it to have these menus that are really good in the context of your BI tool, but not great in the context of presenting your culture and making it feel like your own. A big part of adoption is making sure that your end users feel comfortable and feel at home. One of our customers, Arby's, who uses Curator built out their Curator environment to have logos that looked like their menu. And so they came in and all of a sudden the people who were looking for analyses, their employees logged in and said, oh, I get this. I'm at home. And our Net Promoter Scores on a BI tool went from three to seven just by introducing Curator because it has that feel of what you're interested in. So I've got right here a very vanilla Curator environment. Side navigation, we've got a home page, we've got a search that we can look through, we've got a tutorial page. This is what it would look like if you just started a new trial. Your brand-new shiny Curator instance, you're good to go. What we're going to do right now is walk you through all the steps to build out your own branded experience. Now I cut my teeth training people on Tableau and other BI tools. I'm going to run through this much faster than I would in the training. So for the webinar replay, maybe drop the speed down to 0.5 if you try to use it as like a tutorial or a how-to. But the point here is to show you not necessarily all the right places to click because I guarantee I will click wrong somewhere, but it's to show you the ease of getting something like this up and running. Again, we're talking ROI. We're talking about saving time. The goal here is speed. We want this to be something where you can have multiple tools up and running and ready for the races. And we're going to do it as someone who has absolutely no web coding background, which is myself. So if you look at the backend of Curator, it's just beyoung.portals.InterWorks.com. You can't get to this public-facing, sorry, but if you do a trial, you're more than welcome to. What we're going to do is we're going to first go in and try and make this look like the InterWorks homepage. So I'm going to come down here on the settings on Curator, go to our themes. There's just going to be one main theme. It's right there. This is our global theme that gets applied. I'm going to start playing around. So I can see up here we've got Curator as the site name. I want this to be InterWorks Analytics, and then we need a logo that's happening. So I'm going to pop over here. We're cheating a little bit. Marketing has made our lives very easy by giving us a logo generator. And so I want this 400-pixel InterWorks logo, and then I know I want a favicon as well, which is the little image that shows up next to or in the corner of your browser tab. So I'll download that one. So now I have my logo, my image. I'll come back to the backend of Curator, and then it's a nice easy drag and drop, and it will bring it up. And then you can see the favicon is in there. The logo has showed up on the side and it's not really popping in. I do know just from poking around and making sure that this would look good is that we need to have this logo padding that's on there. So trust me that that's going to be in there. You have full control over playing around with what those patterns look like. Now on the home page, you can see that we've got different options. We could put a dashboard on here. We could put a masonry layout. We could put our own custom page that we built. I'll get to that. But right now it's on the tutorial home page, which is fine. If I go back to the InterWorks home page, we've got the white menu at the top and we've got the black image, and then we've got the black background for me. In this case, I think the image will be able to hold the background well enough. So I'm going to actually change this background here under our global setting and make the main body, we'll just make that white. And then that text will disappear, but we're going to be able to play around with this. Now I'm going to come over to our fonts next just to show you. We can play around with custom fonts if we want. They've been uploaded. I'm not going to change any of the text because I don't mind this being black on the white that we have. But on menu, this is where we're going to start playing. Again, as a non-developer, I'm able to come in and change this from a side navigation to simply a top navigation. So now we have a different setup across the top. I go back to the InterWorks. We've got a white background with black text, so we can swap these around. White background on the navigation. The text is going to be just black. We're good to go. I don't think we need a highlight color, but coming in underneath the menu, we actually don't have a center alignment. So, Ben, if we could add that to the backlog, that would actually be really cool. Already there. Already there. Yes. Thank you, Ben. But instead, I'll pop it over to the right just to show you again. Things are moving around as I'm adapting to them. And then for a menu text, we can play around with some font transformations. I'm going to change it to uppercase as things go in. So you can see those are now adapted and have moved with this live preview. Sometimes just as you're playing with this, by the way, you'll see some bizarre delay between this and what you've chosen that has to do with how it's interacting with Chrome's cache, which also is on the backlog that we're working on. So we've got that menu set up. We have our home page. We have a link out to a file. We have our search, and we're getting to the point where we're looking pretty good. So I'm going to go back to the backend and then here I'm just going to hit refresh and we're going to see if we run into that cache challenge. And so far, things are looking pretty good. Okay, we've got the InterWorks homepage. We've got InterWorks Analytics. You can see it up top. Our favicon has now showed up. We've got our branding and our logo that we're interested in. There's some things I could nitpick and play around with if I indulge my OCD for a little bit, but we're going to put that aside and run with things for now. And what I want to do now is start playing with this home page. So we've got the InterWorks home page, and I am going to take a shortcut a little bit. I'm not going to recreate the carousel effect that we have right here, but what I am going to do is I'm just going to take a quick snip. I'll grab that. We'll save that image as the hero image. And hero image is just a web dev term for having it be that big headline image that's there across the top. I'll now go into the backend, and I know I have this tutorial page that's there. So under content, you can see we actually have a lot more content than just your analytics content. So we have the Tableau's, the ThoughtSpot's, the Power BI's that are there for you to be able to go in and bring in analytics content. That's good, and that should show up. But a lot of our users who use Curator want to do more than just Tableau content or more than just ThoughtSpot content. And so we have the ability to play around with things like tutorials you can put on top of your content. We can build out custom web pages that are here. So what I'm going to do is I will drop that guy and we'll just build out a new InterWorks homepage. And so I've got what's called Page Builder here on the backend. But think of this like a WordPress Lite. I'm going to come in. I've got my elements that I can play around with. If I hit change element, you'll see all the different elements that we've made an easy button for you. The goal here is to be able to make it so that you can add in what your end users need as you're building out this custom experience. So we're going to come back to that hero image, but just to call out, we have things like search, text, buttons, media, tabbed pages, user-customized metrics. There are different things that we can do that are available as elements, including different analytics elements here. If I wanted to just put a dashboard, I could drop it straight on here. We have dashboards from multiple BI tools, not only the headline integrations of Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and Power BI, but we also have simple integrations for things like Looker, Sigma, SSRS to be able to have all of this in one place. If you want to get very fancy, you're welcome to go and play with some embed code or some unrestricted HTML. I don't touch that because I tend to break things despite my best efforts. So I'm actually going to add in a blank element first because I want some spacing between the menu and the picture. And coming in along the side, what I'm going to do is change this to be the full width and then simply make the background color black because I know that's the color image we're dealing with. I can then come in and drop another thing below. We're going to add in the hero image that we just brought in. So I'm going to click here and find that hero image. Add it in. That was still available from the demo. I clicked too fast, but even if it's not readily available for you, you can go and you can upload a file. And there's the hero image that's available. We can bring that in if we want. I'll just take advantage of the fact it was already there. And same thing, we've got our hero settings and we can make this be that full width. No background color is needed, but I do need to come in and give myself a little bit more room to spread that out. So I think 500 is a decent height. It's in here. And then beneath that, I'm just going to add another blank element because I like white space or in this case dark space in between. So full width, background color, it's going to go to black. And then we have our home page that we're working off of. Let me create that, and now we're good to go. If I came back and refreshed this, nothing would change. Right? All I've done is in Curator, I've built out a page that I can reference. So if I then come over on Curator, go back to my themes, I can go to that main theme again. And for my home page, I have the InterWorks home page that I can drop in. I'm going to hit save there, and then I'll come back and refresh here to see what we're looking at. And now we're getting somewhere. We've got our homepage. Yeah, the sizing is a little bit different. Again, my OCD could go back and match it so it's exactly the same or I could rebuild the carousel, but we're really just showing proof of concept here on what is possible. We started with a very Curator-branded thing, and already ten minutes in, we have an InterWorks-branded story that we're working on. But even with that, we've got a home page, we have a file that just came by default where we talk about UX/UI guidelines. So these menus don't have to be limited to just analytics content, but I want to actually start building in that analytics content. So on the backend, we have our integrations. I cheated to set these up already because there's a lot of buttons to fill in, blanks to fill in. So if we're looking back at our Tableau connection that's here, you go in, you're spelling out, this is the server I'm connecting to, and go through and you're passing in the URL, you're setting your authentication, passing passwords and everything. Curator inherits all of the security that you have in your existing BI tools, so you don't have to worry about setting that up twice. But what that enables is if we go back in and we create a new dashboard or bring in a new dashboard, I can go in and I can find something that's already been created. We have the same thing for InterBurger live boards. We have the same thing for ThoughtSpot dashboards that are available. Right? So all of these, we have done the hard work connecting the APIs out to the various services so you can bring them in easily so that something shows up. Ben, I'm going to be clicking buttons for a little bit just to show off what that process looks like. But curious on your perspective here. I know you spend a lot of time working with the devs and working with clients who use a lot of these other features. Do you want to call any out while I'm bringing these in? Yeah. Let's do it. So, I mean, the first thing I'd call out is not just are we making it easier to bring the content in, but we are aware of the security you've already applied. So you know, if you've published things to Tableau, you've probably given some thought to who should see this and who shouldn't see this, especially if you're in a secure environment. And Curator takes that into context. And so when a user logs in, we check what they have access to and we adapt the menu system and the pages to that content. So the menus and things like that will roll up. Right? So they may not see the same thing that you would see if you logged in. And it's really beneficial to just making this customized right out of the box. One thing I will say though, is you can turn those checks off, and you can actually put a default page in when they access something they don't have permission to. That's really great if you want to put up a form for someone to request access to it, or if you're creating a data monetization-type site, and you want to be able to say like, hey, upgrade and get these new things. So a lot of features like that that Curator supports. As far as other features that I think are worth talking about, tutorials, Ben Young mentioned earlier. But tutorials, we actually allow you to take an image of the dashboard and highlight pieces of that dashboard as you're going. So you can really guide people through exactly how to use a dashboard. You can highlight a chart or a control and describe what's going on and give them that extra context. So that can be very, very helpful. The other thing I'll mention along the APIs is, you know, we're talking about ROI over and over again. But remember that the first-time build cost is not where the true expense lives. The true expense is actually after you build it and you have to maintain the thing. And so places or tools like Tableau have recently gone through an upgrade of their APIs from version two to version three, and that is a breaking change. And so things like that come out of the box in Curator and are providing you that support so you don't have to experience those breaks as they happen. Awesome, thanks Ben. Now, as I was going through, while Ben was describing those, you saw me add in a live board and a Power BI dashboard that are in here. I've now come back to my navigation where we're trying to build out what is available across the top. So by default, a Tableau dashboard creates a navigation link, but I actually want to add in a couple more menu links that we can work with. And so in this case, we're going to go in and grab a Power BI dashboard. We're just going to take the same title that's there. Again, when we're looking at discoverability like we were talking about distribution of content, you can have your own SDLC naming convention if you need like a dash-prod or a dash or an underscore-test or something like that. Right? And then you can add an additional layer on top where you're then able to have a different naming convention to make it easier to find inside of Curator. But we've got a link here for our IT Spend Analysis or Power BI report. Then we're going to go down and grab the InterBurger live board, which is we're just going to bring it up right here. So I'm building out these links so that what happens is I now have full control over this experience. But if I go back to my home page and now refresh this, coming in across the top, we now have access to all of these different dashboards. We're in a web-based experience. We're in a website that's branded like ours, but I can go and I can choose whatever tool that I want. Then I love this as a non-developer. If I wanted to move content to the back, I can nest, I can unnest, I can drag and I can drop. And then it's a simple refresh. And the idea of moving a menu over is something that is now taken care of for me. It's little things like that that can spend a surprising amount of time that make me really grateful for what InterWorks and Curator provide. So we've got these links in here. If I click on customers, you can see what it looks like where we'll go in. And so you've got the title of your dashboard. You've got your Tableau experience, fully embedded, full interactivity that's available. And then all the other fun features that we can actually extend beyond that. We don't have time to cover those today, but there's a lot under the hood that Curator can do that's beyond just the typical embed of your different BI tools. Just to show you, they're actually here. Here is our Power BI dashboard that we're looking at and then our InterBurger live board, all inside the same environment. And you have the ability to go in and have those different analyses that are there together. Now, one last thing I want to play with is I actually want to feature these on the home page. So I'm going to go back in again just to show you how easy this is. I'm going to go to my InterWorks home page that we've built out. And then as that loads, looks like we've got this guy in here. We can have a row style. I prefer that background color to actually take that black. It's been fighting me this time. So let me drop that on there. And then I'm going to add a new element. I'm going to add some tiles. So this is tiles out to any content that's featured here in Curator. And so row standard, I'm actually going to keep it as standard. Full width to me stretches. It's fine, but I don't actually need that. The tile selection content type can come through anything. So we could feature menus. We could feature only Tableau reports. We could feature only keyword pages that we built out to show certain types of content. In this case, I featured all of the things. So magic under the hood there. I made sure that these were featured dashboards so they showed up. I'm going to change it to a circle because I think circles look nicer than squares. And then we will save this and let it run. Going to hit refresh here. And in roughly fifteen minutes, we now have a functioning analytics hub. Now it's not done. Don't get me wrong. We need to put in some more work into this to make it useful for my end users. I want to have people be able to come in and search for maybe finance as a keyword and bring back all of the different content that's available. We need to make sure that works. We need to maybe play around with these menus and nest them inside each other. Definitely need to fix a thumbnail here so that it shows up and we have what's needed. But the point is we're talking speed and we're talking time to value, and Curator makes it so you can build your own analytics hub very, very quickly. We're running close on time, but just in conclusion, wanted to have this out here. We have public-facing demos of Curator, not the backend like you just saw. But here's the Curator website. If you go up to demos, you can then look at specific sites that are here and you can see other ways that we've leveraged the Curator platform to build out different experiences. This showcase demo will show off what is possible and then these different views, sports, health care, education, finance. You'll start to see similar patterns of where you can see the Curator infrastructure that enables different experiences for different people to have. So have that up there as someplace you can go and look at, and then we're just going to drop a quick poll for this webinar today on whether you got what you needed, if you want to start a free trial, a personalized demo, we're happy to reach out to you if needed. You're also totally fine to say I'm good now, no action needed. So feel free to vote as needed and we can work with that. And then in the meantime, you've got Ben and myself here. We're wrapping up about fifteen minutes early, which is where we wanted to. Leave time for questions at the end or just a bathroom break between your back-to-back meetings. So I'll leave this up for a little bit more, then we'll switch over to a different slide. But looks like we have some questions coming in that, Ben, you want to answer live. So I'll let you take a first shot. Yeah. So Claire Russell asked about self-service analytics. I don't know if you want to elaborate on exactly what you mean. If you just mean self-service analytics at an organization across all tools or within Curator itself. Within Curator, there's things that you can do. I mean, obviously you can embed Tableau Web Edit, Tableau Ask Data, ThoughtSpot Search. All those things are self-service analytic functions that you can use. Of course we still will have people who are going directly to platforms to build in Tableau or ThoughtSpot or wherever they are comfortable. And then we do things to help make it easy to bring it into Curator. So a lot of people use Curator as the gate to say this is the things that are production and we're going to have a process where we validate those things are worth exposing to everyone in the business. But there are automated ways. So you could like point Curator at a project or project folders in Tableau and automatically bring them in. And so you could give a group the capability to say, this is your production folder when something is ready, publish it there and you're ready to go. So that's definitely a very nuanced topic that we can talk about and go deeper in. So yeah, I think you were asking within Curator. So I think I answered that. If there's anything in that question that you want more further follow-up, feel free to post it. Kent also asked about Curator being analytics-heavy. So on the integration, that is definitely the intention is to be the tool that makes integrating with analytics easier. But things like that generic embed, you can bring any tool that can be embedded. Now there are tools out there that block the ability to be embedded. And so those become things that we should have a conversation about. So if you want to drop any of those tools that your HR or marketing group may care about, let us know and we can definitely do some discovery on that. There are definitely situations where you might want to have multiple things, right? So sales may want to live in Salesforce and that's where we should be embedding things. And then you have sales reports embedded in Curator for the rest of everyone else. And so those environments definitely work. And I think considering where your users are coming from and where they're going to get the most impact of analytics is still important. Yeah. Let me add one thing on there just for Kent's question. So it is definitely analytics-centered in terms of where that is. So when we have SharePoint, it's really something where I wouldn't turn to Curator to store a whole bunch of files or have it as a nice, neat file organization like that. It could do something like that, but it's more dependent on sharing up that analytics content. So I would just frame it as analytics first and supplementary materials second. There's a fair amount of things that we can get to with those iframes that Ben was talking about with sharing out specific files or even just having a menu link out to those other systems. It's often as a suite of tools. Yep. And we do have integrations that are not analytics-specific. So Box is a file cloud storage and you can embed that in Curator. And so you could have a page that gives you a view into a Box folder and people can actually upload or grab files from that. So similar things could happen with the Microsoft suite of tools, of course, as well. Excellent. And we've got another one from Kenneth about a test and prod version of Curator. Is there any sort of migration process between those two? Definitely, your Curator license comes with the ability to have a dev, test and prod environment, and then you can import and export settings. So you can build out your test environment, you could test and make sure that everything works and is set up correctly. You can then do a bulk export from the backend with everything that you need to migrate between environments, and then just import that in prod and have that up and running. And then another question also from Kenneth. So how do you handle other solutions like QlikView, Qlik Sense, Oracle Analytics, and Looker Data Studio? So we're working on building out integrations that are there. If we go, I'll go to the backend again. So if I'm adding in another analytics element that's here, you can see that we do have the ability to drop in a Looker dashboard. This is a simple embed. It's not its own dedicated page like Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and Power BI have. So it's really just an iframe that we're dropping on the page, and you can start showing that content that's available. It's also a similar thing for QlikView and Qlik Sense. And if Oracle Analytics can work with your SSO provider to show up through an iframe, then we can have it in there as well. So if needed, you could even just do a simple embed that goes out to that link. But we're working on building out these integrations more and more to allow for even more of those analytics tools to come together in one hub. Ben, anything to add to that? Yeah, I mean, the big difference between something like Looker, which is a simple embed, is that you provide the URL to us and we make sure that it's a valid Looker URL for embedding. And the difference between that and the deeper integration like Tableau is really the security. Like we're aware of the content. You know, we have the dedicated pages where you can go in and choose something. You can batch import Tableau dashboards easily. So it's a little bit about ease of use and how deeply we go into the system. Some tools don't provide the APIs that we need. So like Sigma is like one of our partners and we like them a lot, but we don't have APIs to actually even see like what content could we embed, right? And so a simple embed is the solution for their platform. Yep. Thanks, Ben. And then Lokesh just answered, does it work across tools? So if I have a dashboard in Tableau, can I click on that and then have it show up in ThoughtSpot search? Not quite because the APIs aren't there yet, but that is on our roadmap to have those talk to each other really nicely. So this is a public-facing demo. I'll throw it in the chat so that anybody could go and look at this if they'd like. It's under self-service for this mixed platform demo if that link takes you to the home page. But here across the top, we have our very stylized, very high-level Tableau dashboard. So you can drill through. You can see content that's there. You have the interactivity that you're used to, the hover experience. We've got Tableau embedded on here. But what happens if you want to drill in further? Right? So we've got this year-to-date comp sales number. Ideally, we could click on something here and it would filter your ThoughtSpot search underneath. Technology is not there yet, but as soon as it is, it's on a roadmap to integrate. For now, you would just go through and recreate the analysis. So here's our year-to-date number that we're looking at. Comp sales will pull up that value. It's going to send the query live down to your underlying database, and you have that 4.3. We can then break this out by our individual region if we want. And so we then have the comp sales and we can drill further into what's actually happening to see what's available. So if we want to see what's happening, what are my comp sales percentage? You can see a third-party is winning here. So this is best-of-breed on the same page. You use Page Builder to drop a Tableau dashboard on top, a ThoughtSpot search underneath, and then you have them point to the same data. And one thing I'll add is our Page Builder does support the ability to do some custom code. So if you wanted to connect JavaScript APIs between systems and create something that our tool doesn't have natively, you could do that. And we got one more question from Nkandoni. So we need to add permissions from Looker Data Studio into a Tableau permission scheme in order to add the permissions to those embedded URLs to other tools. Not quite. I think when you have multiple tools, it's better to outsource your security engagement to some sort of SAML provider, like an Okta that can authenticate and come in, and that will let each system know who is who. And then they'll be able to bring up the appropriate content that's there based off the context of the user as they log in. Yeah, that's definitely the best method. We do have a user mapping functionality to map between sites if you don't have it and you're using Curator-based usernames, but we definitely like things like Okta if you don't have it. And then the next question, where do you see the support and development for Curator in a company? Seems like it would be in IT also. It's actually about a fifty-fifty split between the group. For our clients who are using the managed version of Curator, then their backend looks exactly like this. And a lot of times the business users who are building out the Tableau content will then also own the Curator development. So because they don't have to worry about taking care of a server and they just have this backend experience, they can own it themselves to maintain and build out this experience. Now, if IT or InfoSec policy says you need to handle your own environment, then yes, you're maintaining a lightweight web server, and that then usually involves IT as well. So it's a split. Yeah, I'll just say I totally agree with that. I mean, most common people dealing with adding content are analysts and people in analytic departments, but IT is always involved. And certainly in our bigger customers, IT is the one driving Curator development. We have an Enterprise Edition that helps you scale things out. You could have multiple child sites, different departments could have their own version of Curator. All that could be aggregated up into a parent instance and searchable. So there's definitely a lot of features that we didn't cover today depending on the scale that you're wanting to achieve. Okay. We have a few more minutes just in the allotted hour, but you're more than welcome to drop at this point. Don't see any other questions coming through. If you do have any, please feel free to drop them in the chat or the questions. We've got myself and Ben, I guess both Ben's confusingly here to answer questions for you. But really, again, appreciate the time of taking out to see things today. And we've got links there in the chat for you to go and look at public-facing demos and play around with, and we're more than happy to get in touch and see what's needed. Oh, we got one last cost. Just one last question. Sorry from Kenneth. General costs. My fault. I meant to mention that. So we have three different tiers of Curator. It's priced on a per-environment basis. It's not done per user. So if you have our Enterprise Edition that Ben was talking about, that is $65K for year one. That includes $15K of install up and running. And then we have a Standard Edition that is $20K. The big tipping point between those two is more about high availability and the ability to have enterprise support. When you get into an enterprise-scale dependency, then you need those higher things, which gets you to the Enterprise version. And then we do have a specific lightweight version for Tableau Cloud and Tableau Cloud only that comes in around $10K. But I would say the majority of our customers end up moving to the enterprise scenario, which is that $65K year one and then an ongoing $50K cost to fund the ongoing maintenance. Cool. Well, I think we're set. Thank you so much for all your questions. Really appreciate the interactivity there. And then anything else you want to say? I think we're good to go. No. Great job. Thanks, everyone.

In this webinar, Ben Young and Ben Bausili from InterWorks introduced Curator as a solution for organizations struggling with best-of-breed analytics strategies. Young explained how businesses adopting multiple BI tools face distribution challenges where users cannot easily locate content across platforms like Tableau, ThoughtSpot and Power BI, leading to decreased ROI and adoption. Bausili detailed Curator’s organic development from repeated client website builds into a productized analytics hub. Young demonstrated building a branded analytics hub in fifteen minutes without coding experience, showing how Curator’s API-based approach integrates multiple BI platforms while inheriting existing security permissions. The presentation emphasized Curator reduces typical six-month build timelines to weeks, enabling non-technical users to maintain unified analytics experiences.

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