I think that this is direction of analytics and we'll see products similar to this one in the next few years. The analytics companies realized that they can't a

I think that this is direction of analytics and we'll see products similar to this one in the next few years. The analytics companies realized that they can't answer all the questions their customers ask so they started to add this kind of features to their products, just look at custom applications of Mixpanel, Redshift integration of Amplitude or S3 integration of Keen.io. The main reason that these companies implement these features to their infrastructure is to provide an alternative way to analyze data within their product in order to prevent losing their existing customers that need more advanced analytics features. (They are usually the biggest paying customers) The funny thing is that when you have an analytical database combined with a stream processing application, you can ask almost all questions you want to ask and get answers you need quickly enough so the value of their core product becomes less valuable when you have this alternative way. I think that the BI tools such as Periscope and Mode Analytics realized this and started to promote their products as an analytics product rather than an application that creates charts from your data. [Shameless plug] I'm also working on an open-source analytics platform (https://github.com/buremba/rakam https://github.com/buremba/rakam) that collects data from clients (web, mobile or a smartwatch, doesn't matter), transforms (ip-to-geolocation, referrer extraction etc.) and stores data in a database that you specified. (currently there are two alternatives: Postgres and an in-house big data solution that uses PrestoDB as query engine) Then, you to execute SQL queries, pre-aggregate your data for fast reports with continuous queries and cache query results with materialized views. Once you have these features, you can perform all analytical queries such as funnels, retention, segmentation etc. and create your custom analytics service easily.