Developers building SaaS applications have many analytics options that can help them understand feature usage, but they struggle to do the same thing with their on-premises software.  Yet, collecting usage data from existing on-premises software is critical for their SaaS roadmap and initiatives. Revulytics bridges the gap by providing insight into packaged software, allowing developers to get direct feedback on their product enhancements and functionality.

Vic Demarines, VP of products and strategy for Revulytics.

“Developers have been using crash logs, Windows events logs, and some of their own monitoring but still don’t have visibility into what’s happening at the feature level,” said Vic DeMarines, VP of Products & Strategy at Revulytics.  “Usually, they’ve done some level of integration to gather usage data, but have no easy way to visualize the data nor the resources to spare to develop their own analytics solution.”

Most developers and product managers want detail about product feature trends, but they’re not sure how the back end should be implemented, how information should be organized, and how it should be presented.  When considering on premise software, additional requirements add to the complexity of building a solution – caching data, providing an AI that other product groups can consume, building a scalable reporting infrastructure and providing a dashboard that allows visualization and sharing of the resulting trends.

The Revulytics platform handles all that. It also enables developers to add custom attributes to the default data collected which allows even more detailed filtering and segmenting of the data to isolate the trends that they did not know to look for in prior data collection.  

“We make it extremely easy to integrate usage analytics into an application and visualize the key adoption trends automatically,” said DeMarines.  “You can streamline your development effort, deprecate features of no value and make strategic decisions about the product roadmap without differences of opinions between development and product management.”

Turn analytics to action
Software analytics allow developers to determine how product features are being used and the extent of use. However, developers also want to positively impact adoption.

“It’s one thing to visualize the fact that people had trouble adopting a feature in a particular release and another to educate users about that capability.  Our analytics enable you to take action,” said DeMarines.  “You need to get the data, visualize the solution, fix the problem in the next release and then educate users about the enhancement.”

The Revulytics platform also includes in-application messaging, so developers can notify end users about new features or capabilities they’re not using within the context of the application.  Developers have the option of notifying all users of a particular version or even all users across all versions of a product.  Alternatively, they can target messages to specific users using filters such as license key, product edition or feature category.  

Revulytics helps ensure that notifications don’t negatively impact an application’s functionality.

“In the B2C space, it’s tempting to trigger a pop-up with each click,” said DeMarines.  “We have a policy engine for messaging workflows so you can notify users without interfering with a great user experience.”

Ensure features align with user requirements
Great applications fall short of expectations when they don’t function well in the user’s environment.  Using Revulytics, one ISV discovered that 50 percent of its dentist office customers were still running 32-bit platforms and Windows XP.

“They realized half their users wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the new features,” said DeMarines.  “With data in hand about their users’ environments, they were able to roll out a beta and track KPIs.  One of the key KPIs was feedback from users saying the new features were well-integrated and the end users were able to use the capability.”

Get up and running fast
Developers can create a Revulytics account and get access to all of the platform’s capabilities, free.  The trial is limited only by the number of installs.

“Developers appreciate the ease of integration,” said DeMarines.  “You can just log in and see data presented – no SQL queries or complex reporting tools.”

Learn more at www.revulytics.com