Features to demand from your white-label business intelligence software

If your business has a product, application, or system that requires a business intelligence (BI) feature, then you’re probably weighing up your options—between using a traditional business intelligence tool, building your own business intelligence feature in-house, or opting to use white-label business intelligence.

What is white-label business intelligence?

As a form of embedded analytics, white-label BI is business intelligence that can be embedded within a system, product, or application.

Business intelligence allows data from a variety of sources to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed. Then, the data is displayed as easy-to-digest visualizations that depict the overall picture of company performance.

This allows businesses to make decisions based on that data to further their success—rather than relying on guesswork to decide the best course of action.

Beyond embedded analytics, white-label business intelligence tools specifically can be customized to include the branding of the host company. This ranges from being able to add your brand’s logo and change the colours of the tool to much more advanced branding capabilities.

How does white-label BI benefit businesses?

For a start, the ability to embed white-label business intelligence and customize its functions often makes for a superior product; users’ workflows are smoother since they don’t have to navigate to a third-party platform or software to access their data.

What’s more, white-label business intelligence enhances brand recognition and awareness since the feature is imbued with the company’s branding. This makes your complete product, system, or app—including the BI tool—become more strongly associated with your brand, making your brand more memorable.

This impresses both investors and customers since it makes the business intelligence feature come across as though it’s been developed in-house, stamping your brand with a reputation for having impressive tech capability.

Unlike building a tool in-house, however, using white-label business intelligence provides these benefits without draining the time and resources of your business.

However, the benefits your business can reap from using white-label business intelligence depend on which provider you choose.

Features to demand from a white-label business intelligence software.

Many business intelligence providers claiming white-label capability have often added this functionality as an afterthought, once the demand for white-label BI grew.

In practice, this means that many white-label business intelligence providers only offer the bare minimum of what white-label BI has to offer.

To make sure you get the most out of white-label business intelligence, here are the features you should look out for.

1. Seamless embedding.

One of the advantages of white-label business intelligence is that the BI tool can be embedded within a product or system.

However, many so-called white-label business intelligence tools—ones where the BI software wasn’t purpose-built for white-labeling—don’t integrate well into other systems or applications and may operate differently or look and feel disjointed from the rest of the product or system.

Though it’s difficult to know how well a BI tool embeds before actually purchasing it, you should thoroughly check customer reviews to ensure other customers haven’t had trouble embedding the system.

Likewise, a positive indication that a white-label business intelligence tool will embed well is if the software has been purpose-built for white-labelling, since this will have been a top priority of the BI provider and they’ll have designed the tool with this functionality in mind.

2. Extensive customizability.

Beyond being able to add your logo—and add your company colors—to the BI feature, comprehensive white-label business intelligence provides many more opportunities for customization.

In terms of features, being able to customize email addresses, URLs, fonts, and other aesthetic elements is a good start.

However, the best white-label business intelligence software allows you to design custom themes and may even provide the option to upload your CSS stylesheets, to thoroughly and efficiently pervade the BI tool with your branding.

This allows your business intelligence tool to be customized to flawlessly match the feature’s aesthetic and function to the rest of your product or system.

3. Sub-branding capability.

In addition to being able to customize the business intelligence tool according to the branding of your company, a number of white-label business intelligence providers offer an additional feature: sub-branding.

This is a capability that allows you to further customize the business intelligence feature according to the end user. After all, different users will have different needs—and thus require different business intelligence features as a result.

Sub-branding allows you to make your product, system, or application best suited to its users so that they have the best possible version of your product to fulfill their needs.

4. Compatibility with data sources/connectors.

In order to get the most out of your business intelligence, you need to be able to use all the data available.

A crucial component enabling this is white-label business intelligence software’s ability to connect with data connectors/sources.

As such, you should check that the white-label business intelligence you use has extensive data source and connector compatibility so that users can make use of all the relevant data to gain a comprehensive view of company performance.

5. Flexible subscription model.

Depending on the size and needs of your business, what you need from white-label business intelligence software will vary.

What’s more, as your business grows, its needs will evolve. You need to be able to upgrade your business intelligence software to keep up with the growing demands of your business and the needs of your customers.

So, try to opt for a white-label business intelligence provider that allows you to only pay for what you need, with the option to upgrade your subscription hassle-free when you need to.

It’s also handy to not be ‘locked in’ to an annual contract. After all, the business intelligence feature may not turn out to be everything you hoped it would be.

In this case, it’s really useful (and budget-friendly) to be able to cancel your subscription instantly without being obligated to pay for another year’s worth of business intelligence before you can opt out and/or change your white-label business intelligence provider.

A final component to consider is whether the subscription packages offered by the white-label business intelligence provider will be able to cope with your increasing needs as your business grows.

After all, as your business garners more success, your business intelligence software is going to have to cope with a greater number of customers and lots more data.

Based on your aspirations for your business’s growth, you need to ask yourself if the white-label business intelligence provider you choose is going to be able to fulfill your future needs as well as your needs in the present. This saves you from having to switch providers later down the line.

6. Stellar security.

Compared to traditional BI software, it’s even more essential that the white-label business intelligence you choose has stellar security since it merges with the rest of your system or product.

As the business intelligence tool integrates, its security becomes the system’s security. So, if the security of your white-label BI tool isn’t equal to or greater than that of the rest of the product or app, it may become a point of vulnerability in the system.

In general, cloud-based white-label business intelligence providers afford better security than business intelligence solutions sustained on-premises with the business’s servers.

Whichever white-label business intelligence solution you opt for, you should check that the provider makes security a top priority—and that they have the security certifications to back this up.

7. Comprehensive business intelligence functionalities.

While white-labelling can offer a multitude of benefits for your business, you need to make sure that—as well as being able to customize, brand and embed your business intelligence feature—your white-label BI solution offers all the business intelligence capabilities you need.

Here are the top functionalities that you should be looking for from your white-label business intelligence tool:

• A large selection of chart possibilities for dashboard visualizations, from bar charts to geospatial visualizations.
• ‘Drill down’ functionality to allow the data behind the visualizations to be observed in greater detail.
• Data filters to search for specific data—for example, according to a particular time frame or geographical source.
• Automated visualizations that display data in near real time.
• The ability to create and share reports, dashboards and data.

So, if you’re choosing a white-label business intelligence software to embed into your product or system, make sure to take these seven factors into consideration when making your decision.