Make it Rain! Save Millions per Year on BI with this One Weird Trick
Okay, the title is a little click baity but I’m actually going to show you how to save a million bucks on BI. This will only work for teams that deliver end of line business users with dashboards and visualizations. These users are typically retail staff, call center employees, field workers etc. For this example let's suppose we have 3,000 such users and we are comparing against an equivalent Tableau deployment. Many companies using older BI tools might pay much more than the estimates below.
Annual Tableau Costs
- 3000 (Users) x $420 (Tableau Server per Year) = $1,260,000
- $840 (Tableau Desktop per Year)
- $150,000 (Sr. BI Developer per Year) * 25% (Time per year) = $37,500
- Total = $1,298,340 per year
Annual Cost for Replacement Custom Visualization
- $250,000 (Sr. Visualization Engineer) * 30% (Time per Year) = $75,000 per Year
A Sr. Visualization Engineer is a full stack developer with big data experience, basic UI/UX sensibilities, and some BI experience. Hard to find, but worth it when you do.
Look Ma, we just saved our company $1.2M per year! Custom visualization apps, when deployed for the right use cases, can deliver better user adoption and save us money!
Build vs Buys is a more complicated question now. You don’t want to “buy” for everyone, and you don’t want to “build” for every use case. If you have large isolated populations, you should consider building.
Read these for more on the Custom Visualization wave sweeping Silicon Valley and beyond:
Ajo Abraham is a big data expert known for building beautiful, fast, and high impact custom viz apps. For consulting requests you can email him here ajo@veroanalytics.com
