

Interana (YC W13) promises Facebook-style analytics for everyone - ridruejo
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/07/interana-promises-facebook-style-analytics-for-everyone/

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shostack
What is always missed in these articles is how much of a headache it is to
actually implement a BI tool. If you are expecting to install a little bit of
code and suddenly have a fully tooled interface to explore in a meaningful
manner, you're in for a surprise.

The reality is that you often need to implement a lot of additional logging
for things you never tracked before. You also will likely encounter problems
with your ETL that need to be fixed so the data isn't completely borked. I
guess the silver lining on that last one is that it can serve as a forcing
mechanism to get you to clean up your code/data.

Then, once you've got all that in place, you actually need to build out all
the tooling/models/views for your reports since most of it inevitably won't
fit in standard template mappings, or needs so much massaging it is better to
create a new model from scratch.

The reason web analytics platforms are much easier to pick up is they share
what is largely a common dataset, although even that is getting more complex
with event, audiences, unstructured data, etc. Because of this, they are able
to build out the interface for the vast majority of needed reports. This in
turn makes the data much more familiar and easily explorable and is a key
factor for why business users can pick them up so quickly.

Some platforms offer a services approach, but the concern there is nickel and
diming on getting anything done. Realistically, you need engineering and
analyst resources in-house to really get the most of these systems.

Interana seems to be targeting enterprise customers that would likely have
these resources (otherwise they wouldn't be enterprise-tier) which is a good
start towards mitigating those issues.

Just remember that BI tools are just that...tools...the insights and value you
derive from them are only as good as the data you feed in and the people
actually analyzing it. None of the tools I've seen really spit out actual
insights--they just present a bunch of data and representations of said data
for you to draw your own conclusions from.

Congrats on the launch Interana team, and best of luck tackling these
challenges. One small nit on your site...either let me view full-screen width
images so I can really dig through the visualizations you make available, or
one better--make a totally free and fully functional account available
(ideally without an email required--if I'm kicking tires I'm not asking for a
sales person to contact me or be opted-in to a nurturing funnel). It would
obviously need a pre-populated dataset and reports, but that is the quickest
way for a savvy person to determine if the product will meet their needs.

------
jlas
I'm wondering what their killer feature is. On the whole their product looks
very similar to New Relic's Insights product
([http://newrelic.com/insights](http://newrelic.com/insights)).

~~~
cosud
They're blazing fast. The guy who started facebook's SCUBA is behind this. see
the paper on scuba:
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/courses/fall2013/static/papers...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/courses/fall2013/static/papers/p767-wiener.pdf)

