How to Choose the Right Software as a Service (SaaS) BI Tool

Before you think about your SaaS options, ask yourself why you should choose an "on-demand" BI tool over the more conventional "on-premise" BI tool.

An Easy-to-use BI Solution

A SaaS BI tool can be a great solution, especially if you are a BI beginner:

• No installation - on-demand BI applications require no setup, no overhead, and no wait
• Web interface and mobile BI - SaaS tools are remotely accessible, meaning they're never further away than the nearest mobile phone
• No IT knowledge necessary - Everything is off-site, so there's no need to know about OLAP, ETL, data warehouses, etc.

How a Regulatory Information Management Platform in Life Sciences Chose InetSoft for Embedded SaaS BI

The life sciences industry has long struggled with the complexity of regulatory compliance. From pharmaceutical firms filing global submissions to biotech startups seeking FDA approval, regulatory information management (RIM) platforms provide the structured backbone necessary to handle vast amounts of compliance documentation, submission workflows, and audit trails. But as regulations expand and become increasingly globalized, customers of RIM platforms began demanding more than just storage and tracking—they wanted actionable insights, dashboards, and analytics built directly into the systems they already used. This is the story of how a regulatory information management application, designed specifically for the life sciences sector, turned to InetSoft as its SaaS business intelligence (BI) partner, and why InetSoft won over two other major competitors in the embedded analytics market.

The Rising Importance of Embedded Analytics in RIM

Regulatory affairs departments are under pressure to reduce time-to-market for new drugs while maintaining strict compliance with international regulators. These teams generate enormous volumes of documents: clinical trial submissions, labeling updates, manufacturing change requests, and correspondence with health authorities. Traditionally, RIM platforms acted as digital filing cabinets, offering workflow automation and version control. However, customers began asking a new set of questions: Which regions experience the longest approval delays? What are the bottlenecks in submission assembly? Which compliance issues resurface most frequently across therapeutic areas?

Answering these questions requires analytics—not just static reports, but interactive dashboards that allow users to slice, dice, and drill into data. For the RIM provider, embedding BI capabilities became essential. Their leadership team knew that instead of building analytics from scratch, they needed a partner whose SaaS BI tool could integrate seamlessly, scale with global clients, and present a clean user experience inside their existing cloud application.

The Evaluation Process

The RIM company assembled a cross-functional task force including product managers, engineers, and representatives from their largest pharma clients. Their goal: to evaluate three leading embedded BI solutions. The contenders were InetSoft’s StyleBI, Competitor A (a highly marketed but costly BI vendor with strong branding), and Competitor B (an established BI platform known for advanced analytics but criticized for complexity).

The evaluation criteria focused on five main areas:

• Embedding Flexibility: Ability to integrate dashboards, reports, and visualizations directly into the RIM application without breaking user experience.
• Scalability: Handling large regulatory data sets across multiple regions, product lines, and clients without performance degradation.
• Total Cost of Ownership: Licensing fees, infrastructure requirements, and ongoing maintenance costs.
• User Empowerment: Empowering non-technical regulatory staff to build and modify reports with minimal IT involvement.
• Vendor Partnership: Willingness to provide support, training, and joint development during integration and rollout.

Why InetSoft Emerged as the Winner

While all three vendors had strengths, InetSoft’s StyleBI quickly distinguished itself in multiple areas.

1. Seamless Embedding Without Friction

The RIM company’s primary concern was ensuring that embedded analytics felt like a natural part of their platform rather than a bolted-on module. InetSoft’s flexible embedding APIs allowed developers to drop interactive dashboards directly into their existing SaaS workflows. Unlike Competitor A, which required customers to navigate to a separate BI portal, InetSoft made analytics feel native. This mattered deeply to the RIM’s customer base, who valued simplicity and disliked switching between multiple interfaces during high-pressure regulatory filing periods.

2. Superior Data Mashup Capabilities

Regulatory data is notoriously fragmented, often scattered across submission management systems, pharmacovigilance databases, manufacturing logs, and correspondence repositories. InetSoft’s data mashup engine allowed the RIM provider to unify these disparate sources in real time, creating dashboards that showed, for example, the end-to-end lifecycle of a drug submission from initial dossier creation to health authority approval. Competitor B offered strong analytics, but required extensive ETL preprocessing, which slowed down integration and created dependencies on IT teams. InetSoft’s agility allowed the RIM provider to deliver faster insights with less overhead.

3. Cost Efficiency That Aligned with SaaS Margins

One of the biggest differentiators was cost. Competitor A had a polished product and strong brand recognition but carried steep licensing fees that would erode the RIM provider’s SaaS margins. The leadership team worried that these costs would either need to be passed onto customers—potentially making the RIM less competitive—or absorbed by the company, cutting into profitability. InetSoft’s licensing model was far more favorable for SaaS embedding, offering predictable costs that scaled with usage. This allowed the RIM provider to package analytics as part of their standard offering without forcing a dramatic price hike for clients.

4. Empowering Regulatory Professionals

The RIM provider knew that their users—regulatory affairs professionals—were not data scientists. They needed BI that was approachable, with intuitive drag-and-drop tools and the ability to build ad hoc queries without coding. InetSoft struck the right balance between power and usability. Regulatory staff could answer their own questions without waiting weeks for IT to generate custom reports. This democratization of analytics was a key selling point for the RIM’s pharma clients, many of whom were eager to reduce their dependence on overburdened internal data teams.

5. Partnership and Responsiveness

Finally, the decision came down to partnership. InetSoft’s team invested time in understanding the RIM provider’s unique challenges and even proposed tailored solutions during the pilot. Competitor A, while well-resourced, treated the RIM as just another customer in their massive pipeline. Competitor B offered powerful functionality but lacked responsiveness during critical proof-of-concept stages. InetSoft’s willingness to collaborate, iterate, and support integration set them apart and gave the RIM leadership confidence that they had a true partner, not just a vendor.

The ROI Achieved

After integrating InetSoft’s StyleBI into their cloud application, the RIM provider began to realize measurable returns across multiple dimensions.

• Increased Customer Satisfaction: Clients immediately praised the embedded dashboards, noting improved visibility into submission timelines, compliance bottlenecks, and workload distribution. This led to higher client retention rates and stronger upsell opportunities.
• Operational Efficiency: Regulatory teams saved hours each week by generating their own reports rather than submitting requests to IT. This freed up IT resources to focus on core platform development rather than ad hoc reporting.
• Revenue Growth: With InetSoft embedded, the RIM provider could market “analytics-driven compliance” as a differentiator in sales conversations. This attracted new pharmaceutical clients seeking not just document management, but insights that could accelerate drug approvals.
• Reduced Costs: InetSoft’s favorable licensing terms ensured that margins remained healthy. Unlike with Competitor A’s expensive model, the RIM provider could embed BI without fear of ballooning operational costs.
• Scalability: As the RIM expanded globally, InetSoft scaled seamlessly to handle new datasets from multiple regions and product lines without major reconfiguration.

Looking Ahead

The success of embedding InetSoft into the RIM application is prompting the company to expand its analytics capabilities even further. Plans include predictive analytics for anticipating regulatory delays, automated alerts for compliance risks, and benchmarking dashboards that allow clients to compare their submission efficiency against industry norms. By partnering with InetSoft, the RIM provider has not only enhanced its current offering but laid the foundation for a future where regulatory affairs are driven as much by data as by documentation.

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