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Transitioning to InetSoft’s Serverless Dashboard Microservice: A Nurse Staffing Agency’s Success Story

In the fast-paced world of healthcare staffing, nurse staffing agencies rely heavily on data to manage their workforce, optimize schedules, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. For one mid-sized nurse staffing agency, the decision to switch from Domo to InetSoft’s serverless dashboard microservice marked a transformative step in streamlining operations, reducing costs, and enhancing end-user satisfaction. This article explores the motivations behind the switch, the technical and financial benefits, and the impact on management and end-user experience, offering insights for IT professionals considering similar transitions.

The Need for Change: Challenges with Domo

The agency, which places nurses in hospitals and clinics across multiple states, initially adopted Domo for its business intelligence (BI) needs. Domo provided a robust platform for visualizing workforce data, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and generating reports. However, as the agency grew, several challenges emerged that prompted a reevaluation of their BI solution.

First, Domo’s licensing model proved increasingly costly. The subscription-based pricing, tied to user seats and data volume, strained the agency’s IT budget, especially as the number of users expanded to include managers, schedulers, and compliance officers. Additionally, Domo’s resource-intensive architecture required significant server maintenance, leading to high overhead costs for the agency’s small IT team. Support, while available, often involved lengthy response times, and the platform’s complexity occasionally frustrated end-users who needed quick, actionable insights.

The agency needed a solution that offered scalability, cost efficiency, and a user-friendly interface without compromising on powerful analytics. After evaluating several alternatives, they chose InetSoft’s serverless dashboard microservice, a modern BI platform designed to address these pain points through a flexible, cloud-native architecture.

InetSoft’s Serverless Dashboard Microservice: A Modern Solution

InetSoft’s serverless dashboard microservice is built on a microservices architecture, where individual components operate independently and communicate via APIs. This approach aligns with the needs of organizations seeking agile, scalable, and cost-effective BI solutions. For the nurse staffing agency, the platform offered several key advantages over Domo, particularly in licensing, resource management, overhead, support, and end-user experience.

Licensing: Cost-Effective and Flexible

One of the most significant benefits of switching to InetSoft was the shift to a more flexible licensing model. Unlike Domo’s per-user pricing, which scaled linearly and became prohibitive as the agency added more users, InetSoft’s serverless model uses a consumption-based approach. This means the agency pays based on actual usage, such as the number of dashboards accessed or data processed, rather than a fixed per-user fee. For an organization with fluctuating user counts—ranging from 50 to 200 depending on seasonal demand—this model resulted in substantial savings.

The agency estimated a 40% reduction in licensing costs in the first year, dropping from a six-figure annual subscription with Domo to a more manageable five-figure expense with InetSoft. The elimination of upfront licensing fees for additional users also allowed the agency to scale access to the platform without budgetary constraints, enabling more staff to leverage data-driven insights.

Resource and Overhead Savings: A Leaner Architecture

Domo’s architecture required the agency to maintain dedicated servers, either on-premises or in the cloud, to handle data processing and storage. This setup demanded significant IT resources, including server provisioning, patching, and monitoring, which consumed valuable time from the agency’s three-person IT team. The need for regular maintenance and occasional hardware upgrades further increased overhead costs, with server-related expenses accounting for nearly 20% of the IT budget.

InetSoft’s serverless architecture eliminated these challenges. By leveraging cloud-native microservices, the platform offloads infrastructure management to the cloud provider, reducing the need for dedicated servers. The agency no longer needed to allocate resources for server maintenance, as InetSoft’s solution dynamically scales compute and storage resources based on demand. This shift reduced IT overhead by approximately 30%, freeing up the team to focus on strategic initiatives like integrating new data sources and developing custom dashboards.

Additionally, InetSoft’s data transformation pipeline allowed the agency to process large datasets—such as nurse schedules, compliance records, and client contracts—directly on top of their existing database. Unlike Domo, which often required data extraction and transformation before visualization, InetSoft’s approach minimized data movement, further reducing resource consumption and improving performance.

Support Savings: Streamlined and Responsive

Support was another area where InetSoft outperformed Domo. Domo’s support model, while comprehensive, often involved tiered response times that could delay issue resolution, particularly for non-critical tickets. For a nurse staffing agency where real-time data access is critical to filling shifts and meeting client demands, these delays were problematic.

InetSoft’s support model, tailored to its serverless platform, offered faster response times and a more streamlined process. The agency benefited from InetSoft’s self-service capabilities, which allowed IT staff to resolve common issues without escalating to vendor support. For more complex challenges, InetSoft’s team provided rapid assistance, often resolving tickets within hours rather than days. This efficiency reduced support-related costs by 25% and minimized downtime, ensuring that managers and schedulers could access dashboards without interruption.

Management and End-User Satisfaction: Empowering Users

Perhaps the most transformative impact of the switch was on management and end-user satisfaction. Domo’s interface, while powerful, required significant training for non-technical users, leading to adoption challenges among nurse managers and schedulers. The platform’s complexity often resulted in underutilization, with only 60% of potential users actively engaging with the dashboards.

InetSoft’s serverless dashboard microservice, by contrast, prioritized ease of use. Its interactive dashboards, built with rich visual components, allowed users to explore data intuitively. Features like drag-and-drop report creation and self-service analytics empowered non-technical users to customize views without IT intervention. For example, nurse managers could generate real-time staffing reports, track compliance metrics, and identify scheduling gaps with minimal training.

A post-implementation survey revealed that 95% of users found InetSoft’s interface easy to navigate, compared to 70% for Domo. Managers particularly appreciated the ability to drill down into specific KPIs, such as nurse availability by shift or client satisfaction scores, without relying on IT to generate custom reports. The agency achieved a 90% adoption rate within three months of deployment, surpassing their goal of 80% and significantly improving operational efficiency.

Implementation: A Smooth Transition

The transition from Domo to InetSoft was completed in under three months, thanks to InetSoft’s robust data connectors and implementation support. The agency’s IT team worked with InetSoft’s consultants to map existing data sources, including their SQL-based workforce database and third-party compliance systems, to the new platform. InetSoft’s data mashup engine enabled seamless integration, allowing the agency to retain their existing data structure while enhancing visualization capabilities.

Training was another critical factor in the successful rollout. InetSoft provided targeted training sessions for both IT staff and end-users, focusing on practical use cases like scheduling optimization and compliance reporting. This hands-on approach ensured that users felt confident using the platform from day one.