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What is the feasibility of top SaaS apps creating their own analytics suites to bypass data warehouses, and is this a viable solution?

Conor McCarter

Co-founder at Prequel

To me, the existence of a company like Fivetran implies that it isn't enough just to put these dashboards and analytics in the tool. 

I would bet that if you go look at all the websites of the connectors that Fivetran has built, maybe 90%, 95% would have a reporting analytics feature somewhere in their product. 

I think the reason for that is there are just use cases where the analytics suites and the in-app dashboards just won't work no matter how good the embedded tool is: for example, any use case where that data needs to be joined across datasets from other tools or anytime the query or the analysis is kind of specific to the company and maybe doesn't generalize well across the entire customer base.

Finally, these data teams have their own tools and their own specific ways of processing data, and a lot of them are just much more comfortable querying and analyzing that data and their own tools versus logging into an in-app dashboard or some sort of embedded BI to do that analysis. 

Pretty often, we'll hear stories of companies that expose that in-app analytics feature but still get bombarded with requests for a deeper, more complex analysis. Or they’ll say the in-app tool just isn't working and ask for some way to get the raw data, whether that means dumping it in S3, loading it into the data warehouse for them, or trying to get some third party to build a connector for them.

Find this answer in Conor McCarter, co-founder of Prequel, on Fivetran's existential risk
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