ThoughtSpot Offers Expanded Data Analytics Portfolio, New Consumption-Based Pricing

New Teams and Pro editions of ThoughtSpot’s cloud data analytics software, combined with new pricing models, are expected to expand the company’s potential market reach.

ThoughtSpot is expanding the breadth of its cloud data analytics lineup, offering new editions for workgroups and power users, and introducing a new consumption-based pricing model.

The company, which held its Beyond annual customer conference this week, also unveiled enhancements to its core analytics platform and debuted a data analytics bundle specifically targeted toward startups, nonprofits and educational institutions.

The new products and the pricing changes are sure to accelerate a strategic pivot to the cloud ThoughtSpot began in 2020 – it now uses the tagline “the Modern Analytics Cloud company.”

[Related: ThoughtSpot Taps Former MuleSoft, Salesforce Exec Vahalia To Be Its New Global Channel Chief]

In the last year annual recurring revenue from ThoughtSpot’s cloud products grew by more than 175 percent and now make up about two-thirds of ThoughtSpot’s ARR, according to the company.

In the last year 95 percent of new customers purchased cloud products, according to the company, with roughly half of those making six-figure purchases. During the last two quarters about 90 percent of average contract value is for cloud services, said Sean Zinsmeister, ThoughtSpot senior vice president of product marketing, in an interview with CRN.

The move away from a traditional user license model to a consumption-based pricing model is part of an overall shift to consumption-based pricing among companies within the data analytics technology “stack” driven by cloud data warehouse giants such as Amazon Web Services and Snowflake, according to Zinsmeister.

“Our model has obviously evolved over time as we look at where the cloud data warehouse companies are [and with] more people moving to consumption-based pricing,” Zinsmeister said. “As we looked at it, how do we find a balanced model where we can open up access to more and more ThoughtSpot customers – to be able to get people started right away – that also makes more sense from a price point but is also differentiated?”

The new pricing will help ThoughtSpot expand beyond the Global 2000-type businesses and organizations that make up the bulk of the company’s customer base today and expand sales to more small and mid-size customers, Zinsmeister said.

The new pricing also provides customers with more cost predictability and is designed “to make sure that we can offer very clear and transparent pricing,” Zinsmeister added.

ThoughtSpot Enterprise Edition consumption-based pricing is based on actual queries with an unlimited number of users, user groups and data with enterprise-grade support SLAs, according to the company.

The new Teams Edition is targeted toward small and mid-size businesses and groups and departments within larger organizations. It’s priced at a flat fee of $95 per month for a single user-group with unlimited users.

The Pro Edition starts at $2,500 per month for up to five user-groups with unlimited users with customers paying only for what they consume based on actual queries.

The Teams and Pro editions differ from ThoughtSpot Enterprise Edition in that Teams and Pro don’t include as extensive security capabilities as the Enterprise version. ThoughtSpot’s SpotIQ automated insights engine also isn’t available for the Teams Edition and is an upgrade option for the Pro Edition.

Startups, nonprofits and educational institutions with fewer than 100 people and less than $10 million in revenue can take advantage of a bundle that includes the Pro Edition with per-query charges waived, according to the company.

The update to ThoughtSpot’s core platform includes a number of new capabilities including ThoughtSpot Sync, CodeSpot, Bring Your Own Charts, new Liveboard features and multiple new SpotApps – the latter pre-built analytical application templates.

“The modern data stack is shifting,” Zinsmeister said, pointing to cloud platforms like AWS, Google, Snowflake and Databricks, along with cloud-based tools for data management and data transformation.

New capabilities in ThoughtSpot are designed to help the company’s platform fit with those shifts. “Our goal is to be the experience layer – the front-end, if you will – of the modern data stack,” Zinsmeister said.

Some new features, including CodeSpot and the additional SpotApps, are designed to help customers embed analytical capabilities into applications and workflows. “The big movement we’re seeing in the marketplace is this idea of analytics as code,” Zinsmeister said.

Many of the ThoughtSpot platform additions and enhancements make the system “more composable” for the company’s partners and help them better work with the data analytics stack, according to Zinsmeister. And the additional SpotApps and embedded analytics capabilities provide partners with opportunities to extend the platform with their vertical industry expertise.

“It gives [partners] new options to sell different parts of the modern data stack wrapped in the ThoughtSpot experience layer to [their] clients,” Zinsmeister said. “We’re giving partners the ability to meet the customers where they are.”