Services for Organizations

Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection

Consulting & Strategy Sessions

Ventana On Demand

    Services for Investment Firms

    We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

    Consulting & Strategy Sessions

    Ventana On Demand

      Services for Technology Vendors

      We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

      Analyst Relations

      Demand Generation

      Product Marketing

      Market Coverage

      Request a Briefing



        David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

        << Back to Blog Index

        ThoughtSpot Enables Simpler Analytics with AI and NLP

        Organizations today have huge volumes of data across various cloud and on-premises systems which keep growing by the second. To derive value from this data, organizations must query the data regularly and share insights with relevant teams and departments. Automating this process using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) enables line-of-business personnel to query the data faster, generate reports themselves without depending on IT, and make quick decisions. Some organizations have started using NLP in self-service analytics to quickly identify patterns and simplify data visualization. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research finds that about 81% of organizations expect to use natural language search for analytics to make timely and informed decisions.

        Ventana_Research_Benchmark_Research_Analytics_02_Least_Common_Analytics_20220112

        ThoughtSpot is a cloud data analytics company that offers natural language search, AI and business intelligence capabilities. It enables business personnel to conduct self-service data analysis by using natural language query (NLQ). Its AI/ML can analyze big data from various cloud data warehouses including Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google Big Query, Azure Synapse Analytics, Teradata, SAP HANA and Databricks.

        ThoughtSpot recently raised $100 million in its Series F funding, raising the company valuation to $4.2 billion. The company aims to invest in its cloud analytics platform and to accelerate growth in the cloud ecosystem by strengthening its analytics capabilities. The company also announced integrations and partnerships with leading players like Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google BigQuery, DataRobot, dbt Labs, Dremio and Starburst, among others.

        Ventana_Research_Benchmark_Research_Analytics_08_Time_spent_20220112

        Organizations also need to ensure that processes, applications and data can be integrated across cloud and on-premises systems and are easily accessible. Our research shows that accessing and integrating data is still the most time-consuming part of the data preparation process.

        Earlier this year, ThoughtSpot acquired Diyotta, a serverless data integration platform, to expand integrations with data platforms, AI/ML services and data applications built by web developers. It also announced the release of ThoughtSpot Data Workspace which enables analytics engineers, analysts and developers to connect to various cloud data platforms, model their data and run live search queries directly on these platforms.

        ThoughtSpot SpotApps is its integrated scriptable application building functionality with pre-built templates to support third party ISVs including ServiceNow and Snowflake. It also allows personnel to migrate data models and content between different environments, such as development and production.

        Organizations are moving their IT infrastructures to the cloud, adopting a cloud-native and AI-powered approach to cloud analytics to accelerate time to value, drive growth and enhance scalability. Cloud analytics can rapidly increase the ease, accessibility and capability of performing data analysis on big data sets. And NLP can simplify the data exploration, enabling personnel to find answers themselves.

        ThoughtSpot SpotIQ is its AI-analytics engine that can generate insights on search results, visualizations or a data set. It claims it can query the data for billions of data points and identify trends, correlations and outliers. SpotIQ works on ThoughtSpot's built-in DataRank ML algorithm and reinforcement learning to find related data and get better with use. Line-of-business personnel can then enhance insights with feedback to ensure relevant machine-discovered insights.

        ThoughtSpot Everywhere is its low-code embedded analytics platform that allows developers and product leaders to build interactive data applications and incorporate services, including search and AI-driven analytics, directly into applications, products and services. ThoughtSpot Everywhere also offers modeling flexibility via ThoughtSpot Modeling Language (TML).

        While ThoughtSpot, through its application of NLP, has made it easier for line-of-business individuals to access data, there are some areas for potential improvement. The modeling process could be streamlined to make the setup process easier. In addition, the search constructs could provide more flexibility in the phrasing it supports.

        I recommend that organizations looking to provide self-service analytics to a broader portion of their workforce should examine the capabilities of ThoughtSpot. Its intelligent query generation using AI and NLP enables non-technical personnel to search across complex schemas more easily. And it can integrate with various cloud platforms to analyze data directly from those systems.

        Regards,

        David Menninger

        Authors:

        David Menninger
        Executive Director, Technology Research

        David Menninger leads technology software research and advisory for Ventana Research, now part of ISG. Building on over three decades of enterprise software leadership experience, he guides the team responsible for a wide range of technology-focused data and analytics topics, including AI for IT and AI-infused software.

        JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

        Our Analyst Perspective Policy

        • Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business, industry and technology vendor trends. Each Analyst Perspective presents the view of the analyst who is an established subject matter expert on new developments, business and technology trends, findings from our research, or best practice insights.

          Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@ventanaresearch.com

        View Policy

        Subscribe to Email Updates

        Posts by Month

        see all

        Posts by Topic

        see all


        Analyst Perspectives Archive

        See All