Interana (YC W13) promises Facebook-style analytics for everyone

What is always missed in these articles is how much of a headache it is to actually implement a BI tool. If you are expecting to install a little bit of code and suddenly have a fully tooled interface to explore in a meaningful manner, you're in for a surprise.

The reality is that you often need to implement a lot of additional logging for things you never tracked before. You also will likely encounter problems with your ETL that need to be fixed so the data isn't completely borked. I guess the silver lining on that last one is that it can serve as a forcing mechanism to get you to clean up your code/data.

Then, once you've got all that in place, you actually need to build out all the tooling/models/views for your reports since most of it inevitably won't fit in standard template mappings, or needs so much massaging it is better to create a new model from scratch.

The reason web analytics platforms are much easier to pick up is they share what is largely a common dataset, although even that is getting more complex with event, audiences, unstructured data, etc. Because of this, they are able to build out the interface for the vast majority of needed reports. This in turn makes the data much more familiar and easily explorable and is a key factor for why business users can pick them up so quickly.

Some platforms offer a services approach, but the concern there is nickel and diming on getting anything done. Realistically, you need engineering and analyst resources in-house to really get the most of these systems.

Interana seems to be targeting enterprise customers that would likely have these resources (otherwise they wouldn't be enterprise-tier) which is a good start towards mitigating those issues.

Just remember that BI tools are just that...tools...the insights and value you derive from them are only as good as the data you feed in and the people actually analyzing it. None of the tools I've seen really spit out actual insights--they just present a bunch of data and representations of said data for you to draw your own conclusions from.

Congrats on the launch Interana team, and best of luck tackling these challenges. One small nit on your site...either let me view full-screen width images so I can really dig through the visualizations you make available, or one better--make a totally free and fully functional account available (ideally without an email required--if I'm kicking tires I'm not asking for a sales person to contact me or be opted-in to a nurturing funnel). It would obviously need a pre-populated dataset and reports, but that is the quickest way for a savvy person to determine if the product will meet their needs.

I'm wondering what their killer feature is. On the whole their product looks very similar to New Relic's Insights product (http://newrelic.com/insights).