Looking for Information about Data Mashups?

Data mashup is a central capability of InetSoft's StyleBI business intelligence software platform. InetSoft has solutions to meet the needs of those organizations that have a BI environment and have developed data warehouses, operational data stores, or data marts, but are experiencing difficulty leveraging that data to yield insights that can improve corporate performance.

Some key benefits to InetSoft's mashup capabilities included in its StyleBI business intelligence software platform are:

Explore data with self service solutions:

• A visualization driven approach allows users to perform their own reporting and analysis with very little IT support. By using familiar graphical objects and an intuitive Web 2.0 interface end users are empowered to easily explore, manipulate, and display data to gain new insights.

Connect easily to existing data sources:

• With its patent-pending Data Block technology, InetSoft simplifies the process of accessing data. Users can retrieve information from data warehouses, transactional databases, or other sources regardless of whether they are stored as relational databases, XML, flat files, etc. This data can then be dynamically mashed-up, manipulated, and transformed as Lego like data assets.

Meet your ROI goals:

• InetSoft has flexible pricing models that allow you to deploy a solution that accommodates your unique situation. InetSoft’s architecture provides a total BI solution within one unified application. However, if your needs dictate, deploy just the components that you need.

Scale to meet the needs of the organization:

• Built upon open J2EE standards our application provides a solution that incorporates clustering, load balancing, and failover to provide high availability and quick response time. Additional features such as page streaming, data caching, and performance tuning ensure optimal operation as your needs increase.

StyleBI from InetSoft. It's Easy. Agile. Robust.

Learn about the top 10 features of embedded business intelligence.

Why IT Teams Should Evaluate InetSoft StyleBI for a Data Mashup Solution

As the volume, variety, and velocity of data continue to grow exponentially, organizations are struggling to harmonize fragmented data sources into cohesive, actionable intelligence. The need to integrate disparate datasets—spanning cloud storage, databases, APIs, spreadsheets, and legacy systems—has made data mashup platforms essential. Among the available tools in the enterprise BI market, InetSoft’s StyleBI stands out as a highly adaptive, lightweight, and developer-friendly solution that aligns well with modern IT priorities.

This article explores why technical teams should evaluate StyleBI for data mashup projects, especially in hybrid environments that demand agility, scalability, and embedded analytics. With over two decades of innovation in business intelligence and a reputation for enterprise-grade performance, InetSoft offers a compelling tool for any organization seeking to simplify data integration while empowering non-technical users to explore data independently.

1. Lightweight Data Mashup Engine That Fits Modern IT Architecture

StyleBI’s architecture is optimized for deployment in both cloud-native and on-premise environments. Unlike monolithic platforms that impose significant infrastructure overhead or force organizations to adopt proprietary data models, StyleBI uses a flexible microservice-oriented architecture. This enables IT departments to plug it into existing ecosystems with minimal disruption.

The Style Intelligence Data Block engine—a core component of StyleBI—handles real-time data mashup by blending live and cached data sources. IT professionals appreciate its SQL-like scripting capabilities, which allow for deterministic control over joins, filters, calculated fields, and data lineage. This model gives the IT team the confidence to audit, optimize, and secure the transformation pipeline end-to-end.

2. Self-Service with Governance: Empower Users, Control the Flow

One of the biggest tensions in enterprise BI is balancing IT governance with end-user freedom. StyleBI resolves this by enabling the IT team to define reusable data blocks, governed connections, and business logic templates. These serve as curated, reusable resources that analysts, engineers, and even non-technical users can use to build their own dashboards or reports without writing a single line of code.

While many tools offer drag-and-drop features, StyleBI ensures that those visuals are built on top of secure, scalable mashups. For the IT department, this means fewer ad-hoc data requests and less risk of rogue queries. For business units, it means faster insights with fewer bottlenecks.

3. Exceptional Data Source Flexibility

StyleBI connects to virtually any data source: relational databases (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL), cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery), SaaS APIs (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk), flat files (CSV, Excel), NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Cassandra), and even legacy enterprise systems. It offers out-of-the-box connectors for hundreds of applications and supports REST/SOAP for custom data ingestion.

Moreover, it supports both live query and in-memory caching strategies. The IT team can configure policies that prioritize performance, cost-efficiency, and freshness, based on source type, business SLAs, and user demand. This makes StyleBI well-suited for complex hybrid data landscapes.

4. Built-in ETL and Data Wrangling Tools

StyleBI’s mashup layer includes data wrangling features typically found in standalone ETL tools—data type normalization, row-level transformation, pivoting/unpivoting, merging, custom scripts, and conditional logic. This eliminates the need for a separate pipeline in many use cases, streamlining the architecture and reducing maintenance effort.

For IT teams, this means faster deployment cycles, simpler architecture diagrams, and fewer integration points. Rather than wait on ETL engineers to modify upstream pipelines, analysts and BI developers can create clean, shaped datasets right within the mashup layer—subject to role-based access and audit trails.

5. Scalable and Embedded Analytics Integration

StyleBI isn’t just a data mashup tool. It’s a complete BI platform with support for dashboards, reports, alerts, and data storytelling. What makes it stand out for IT audiences is the full support for embedded analytics. With white-labeling capabilities, secure multi-tenancy, and SDKs for JavaScript integration, IT departments can offer seamless user experiences across web portals, intranets, and SaaS platforms.

This turns BI into a product—whether for internal users or external customers—and enables teams to control user experience, scale securely, and monetize data products if desired. The mashup engine powers all these experiences under the hood, giving IT full visibility and control over how data is accessed and interpreted in production environments.

6. Advanced Security and Access Control

Security is central to any enterprise BI strategy. StyleBI provides comprehensive authentication options (LDAP, OAuth, SAML, Active Directory) and row- or column-level security policies that can be defined per user role, department, or business unit. This granularity ensures sensitive data is never exposed inadvertently, even in shared environments.

Role-based access, secure audit logs, encrypted data transport, and support for regulatory compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX) make StyleBI a trustworthy partner for IT teams managing highly regulated or data-sensitive environments. The separation of data access control from UI-level customization also helps organizations enforce clean, repeatable security models.

7. Visual Mashup Designer for Developers and Analysts Alike

StyleBI’s visual data flow designer is particularly appreciated by teams that need both speed and transparency. IT developers can script transformations, design workflows, and debug joins with precision, while analysts can visually follow the lineage from source to dashboard. This dual mode of interaction (visual + code) reduces miscommunication and encourages collaboration across departments.

Unlike black-box BI tools that obscure how data was derived, StyleBI ensures every transformation is auditable and testable. In environments where data quality is paramount—finance, healthcare, manufacturing—this visibility is non-negotiable.

8. Agile Licensing and Open Source Option

InetSoft offers a range of licensing models, including an open source version of StyleBI, which allows IT departments to prototype and evaluate features before committing to enterprise deployment. This is particularly valuable for startups, public sector organizations, or IT departments under cost constraints.

The open source option includes essential data mashup and visualization capabilities, and can be extended or embedded into custom applications. For more robust deployments, premium support, scalability tools, and security modules are available in the commercial versions.

9. Proven Enterprise Performance and Support

StyleBI is not a newcomer—it has been battle-tested across Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and fast-scaling SaaS vendors. The platform’s uptime, performance tuning, and customer support have earned it a loyal user base. InetSoft’s documentation, training, and customer success teams provide a mature onboarding process for IT teams deploying at scale.

Use cases across sectors—from supply chain analytics in manufacturing to CRM insights in retail to real-time compliance monitoring in healthcare—show the versatility and resilience of the platform. When evaluating data mashup solutions, having a vendor with deep experience across domains is a valuable asset.