Real-Time Analytics with StarTree and Embeddable

Users are increasingly demanding real-time access to data and insights from the apps they use every day, and they expect an intuitive, digestible UX and UI. But building a data experience that’s lightning-fast and lives up to the lofty expectations of your users has traditionally been a complex and costly challenge… until now.

With StarTree and Embeddable, joint users can combine the power of a real-time analytics platform with an analytics presentation layer to build faster, more efficient user-facing analytics applications. In this blog, I’ll discuss the advantages of using StarTree and Embeddable together.

About StarTree

StarTree enables companies to build high-performing real-time applications on vast datasets via their fully-managed platform, StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot. While there are many real-time analytics databases on the market, StarTree Cloud was designed for scalability while providing sub-second latency results when serving millions of users. StarTree Cloud can ingest a petabyte or more of data at rates of 100,000+ Queries per Second (QPS).

About Embeddable

Embeddable is a highly flexible embedded analytics toolkit designed to fit seamlessly with your engineering workflows and enable you to build fully-bespoke, lightning-fast analytics experiences into user-facing applications. Embeddable is the latest venture from the team behind the popular BI tool, Trevor.io.

The power of StarTree + Embeddable

StarTree powers enterprise-grade analytics implementations for market-leading companies like Just Eat Takeaway and Stripe that require vast volumes of data to be queried and made available at the visualization layer in real-time. What these real-time analytics applications also have in common is a need to deliver considerately designed end-user experiences that integrate seamlessly with their applications and enable users to quickly and efficiently extract insights.

Off-the-shelf tools don’t provide the flexibility needed to create fully bespoke experiences, as they ultimately control the charting components and only provide limited inputs to control them (e.g. colors, fonts, etc.). The leading providers of embedded analytics (such as PowerBI, Tableau, Looker, etc.) also require you to embed via an iframe, which not only degrades the user experience but also worsens loading times as they have to load a third-party application before the database request can even be sent.

In the past businesses looking for fully bespoke, real-time analytics experiences were left with one option: to invest in a costly and time-consuming custom analytics build, and to manage ongoing optimizations, edits, and maintenance via their engineering teams.

This is where Embeddable comes in. As a highly extensible developer toolkit for embedded analytics, Embeddable is purpose-built to enable applications to deliver fully bespoke, high-performance analytics into customer-facing applications. The no-code builder enables teams to combine reusable charting components (defined in code) to create and update analytics experiences without relying on engineers. Users can embed via a web component — no iframes! — that also loads the charts natively within the Document Object Model (DOM). This setup gives your customers a native experience that loads data fast and supports bidirectional communication with the rest of your application.

Example of how users can build customer-facing applications with Embeddable

Embeddable and StarTree are a match made in heaven for teams wanting to create truly remarkable real-time analytics experiences to their customers and users, combining a lightning-fast, real-time analytical platform with an analytics presentation layer that can be defined down to the pixel in code and loaded natively in your application.

Use cases for StarTree + Embeddable

Some classic use cases for highly bespoke, real-time analytics built on vast datasets include verticals like:

Digital gaming – Digital games have millions of globally distributed players creating terabytes to petabytes of data concurrently in a highly engaging and experiential environment. They have an acute need for displaying up-to-the-second data in the form of leaderboards, rankings, and score sheets — oftentimes running complex calculations such as aggregations at scale in the background.
FinTech – With vast volumes of transactions, high data consumption, and business-critical insights, companies like Stripe and Razorpay are already leveraging the power of StarTree to ensure data is loaded fresh and lightning fast. Stripe’s dashboards, used as the main landing page in their app, have dramatically raised the bar for the other players in the space.
Information Technology and Services – Whether providing web services, streaming video platforms, or improving cybersecurity posture and response, real-time analytics are an increasing requirement for many IT services and solutions. Wix uses StarTree to show their users how their online sites are performing. StarTree can also be used to provide observability, analyzing logs, metrics, and traces for service performance.
Transportation and Delivery – Think JustEat Takeaway or DoorDash. Time and real-world location are incredibly precious variables in these kinds of businesses, and consumption of vast swathes of data happens concurrently, in real time, across multiple highly invested user personas. Speed, support for geospatial and time-series queries, and a considerately designed analytics experience are not only desirable, but mandatory.
Retail – Shopping, whether online or in-store, is highly dependent on user experience. New customers want to see relevant offers aligned to their interests, and returning customers expect their prior purchase decisions to affect what they’re offered in the moment. Personalization and customer insights are core requirements. For example, The Guitar Center uses StarTree to provide insights into the shopping behaviors of their customers so that local store associates can better understand individual needs.
AdTech and MarTech – Brands want to get their messages to the right people. Whether B2B or B2C, there are ever-increasing demands on AdTech and MarTech solutions for better return on investment, faster responsiveness, and more detailed reporting. Sovrn used StarTree to reduce client report times from 24 hours down to seconds.

These use cases are examples where the value of a bespoke, engaging, and fast-loading real-time analytics stack can have a huge impact on efficiencies and profitability for the businesses that invest in the right tooling.

Conclusion

Combining the power of Apache Pinot in a managed service via StarTree with a powerful, highly flexible visualization platform on top via Embeddable, teams are able to deliver bespoke, real-time analytics experiences to their customers at scale.

Want to learn more? Reach out to the team at StarTree or the folks at Embeddable to discuss your requirements.

Harry is Embeddable’s COO, and has many years of experience building software companies in the data and analytics space.