Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of NetSpring Product & Behavioral Analytics on Google BigQuery™. NetSpring on BigQuery allows customers to do advanced product analytics directly on top of a BigQuery data warehouse, without any data movement. NetSpring is ushering in the next generation of product analytics that is aligned with the modern data stack, centered on a central data warehouse store for all data. Contact us to get a live demo.
First-generation product analytics
Traditional product analytics tools have purpose-built, point solutions, with proprietary tightly coupled instrumentation, specialized compute systems, and closed data stores. This was driven by the limitations of data warehouses and Business Intelligence (BI) tools that were not designed for expressing or efficiently computing product analytics workloads involving event streams, time series, event sequences/flows, and specialized visualizations.
The first-generation product analytics tools solved an important need, particularly around product instrumentation and helping customers get a first-level view into how users were using their product. However, they present several challenges:
- Analytics is limited to pre-canned templated reporting without the power of BI-style ad-hoc exploratory analysis. As a result, product and growth managers are unable to answer the next level of questions they have about product usage and user behavior. They have to then rely on their data engineering and BI teams to do the next level of analysis – this could take weeks, and is now disconnected from the product analytics tool they use.
- Data engineering and BI teams are burdened with having to build specialized one-off reports in SQL/BI tools to service constant, ad-hoc requests from product and growth teams. They have to export data out of product analytics tools and into the warehouse – an ETL overhead that they have to manage. They struggle with difficult to author SQL to express specialized funnel/path type queries and generate reports in BI tools that were not designed for such analytics. This results in high cost and less time for working on higher-value problems.
- Analytics is limited to just the product instrumentation stream, unable to leverage the rich business context available in the enterprise data warehouse. While “reverse ETL” products help a bit with exporting simple properties out of the warehouse, they don’t allow for working natively with the full business data model within the product analytics tool; they also result in copies of data in multiple systems, not to speak of the overhead of managing yet another ETL tool/job. As a result, the analytics is limited primarily to basic product metrics and not relatable to broader business metrics.
- Product instrumentation data leaves the secure enterprise environments into vendor-managed external black-box stores. With today’s increased focus on privacy, security and governance, this is highly undesirable for many enterprises.
Next-generation product analytics in the modern data stack
The next generation of product analytics tools, purpose-built for the modern data stack, are overcoming these challenges.
NetSpring is pioneering this change. With NetSpring, you get the simplicity of pre-built product analytics visualization modules, the power of BI-style data discovery and exploration, working directly on the data warehouse, leveraging all your enterprise data for richer analytics. This can have a profound impact on your business.
NetSpring Product & Behavioral Analytics on BigQuery is aligned with the core tenets of the modern data stack:
- All enterprise data resides in a single central enterprise data warehouse. No data silos. No data movement to external stores outside the control of the enterprise data and security teams.
- Product instrumentation is decoupled from analytics. Independent instrumentation systems such as Snowplow, Segment and RudderStack allow for landing product instrumentation data in the data warehouse in an open format that is consumable by any analytics tool. No lock-in to a single analytics vendor.
- Un-opinionated instrumentation that does not force you into a vendor-dictated data model. Enterprises need to have the flexibility to model their unique business for effective analytics.
- All analytics tools work off the central data warehouse directly. No data copies.
Take your product analytics to the next level
NetSpring Product & Behavioral Analytics on BigQuery lets you take the sophistication of product analytics to the next level that can be game changing.
- Enjoy the simplicity of product analytics visualization modules to easily do funnels, paths etc., to answer the first level of questions.
- Answer the next level of questions easily with BI-style self-service ad-hoc visual exploration. No need to call your data engineering or BI team. Save weeks of time waiting around for reports.
- Seamlessly go back and forth between pre-canned templated product analytics reports to ad-hoc explorations for deeper insights. Never be constrained by the inability to ask and answer any question about product usage or user behavior.
- Combine product instrumentation data with other business context data in BigQuery to get wider insights that can impact your business outcomes. Don’t be limited to just the myopic insights from product instrumentation data.
- Have the flexibility of deploying in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or using a hosted SaaS service.
The NetSpring advantage
NetSpring’s innovative ‘Relational Event Streams’ technology enables taking advantage of modern data warehouses like BigQuery for product analytics workloads. Its ‘NetScript’ language facilitates easy expressibility of complex event flow analytics. NetSpring’s engine generates queries to BigQuery that are optimized for efficient event-oriented computations. NetSpring’s integrated event- and state-oriented model enables BI-style ad-hoc dimensional slice-and-dice analysis over time-series and event flow patterns.
NetSpring is breaking new ground in challenging traditional thinking around how product analytics systems are built. It is blurring the unnecessary distinction that exists today between product analytics and business intelligence tools.
Reimagine product analytics with NetSpring. Contact us to get a live demo.
