In today's data-driven economy, organizations often compete on the data and insights they provide customers. To succeed as data suppliers, these organizations-including software makers and commercial enterprises in any industry-embed business intelligence (Bl) and analytics functionality in their applications, providing customers with tools to view, interact, modify, model, and visualize data to suit business requirements.

Most data suppliers start their Bl journey by building reports and dashboards using in-house developers and engineers, but many quickly get overwhelmed with requests for new reports and self-service features such as authoring, visualization, and data blending. These data suppliers may then opt to replace custom code with a commercial Bl tool, which they embed or integrate with on-premises or cloud applications.

This report investigates the costs of both building and buying Bl and analytics functionality to embed in software applications. Each option-build and buy-has overt and hidden costs that enterprises who want to monetize data with reporting and analysis tools should understand.