Standalone Analytics Application

The standalone analytics application represents Stage 0 in the Embedded Analytics Maturity Model, where the analytics are not embedded into the core application at all.

Similar to the traditional business intelligence model, analytics is delivered to users in a completely separate application. The only integration is data integration between the main data-generating application and the analytic application. Data access is typically provisioned through a data extract, an API, or a data export.

From the user standpoint, a standalone analytics application results in a disjointed experience. Users have to work with two separate applications, which likely look and operate differently and have no security integration. A familiar example is exporting data from the application for analysis in Excel, and creating a new copy of data along the way. Once the data changes, the Excel data becomes outdated.

Common instances of standalone analytics applications are when the product generating data has no business user interface or when the data comes from applications that you cannot embed into. An example of the former is Google Analytics. The service tracks visitor activity on a website. This visitor activity gets fed into the Google data store, but business users can only access that data by logging into the Google Analytics website.