How Datacubed Health Delivered Compliant Embedded Analytics at Scale using Holistics

This never happened before.

Even before Vikram bought Holistics, he suggested doing co-marketing together. “I’m happy to co-market with you guys,” Vikram Natarajan, the CTO of Datacubed Health told Holistics team.

“Not for any price discounts, we want to do this from a collaborative sense that we care about the interactivity and security of our preferred embedded BI tool.”

The offer came out of a deeper frustration.

Their previous embedded BI tool (established since 2004), had forced their team into endless workarounds because of their legacy BI architecture built before the cloud went mainstream. Basic requirements turned into custom engineering projects, the lack of reliability raises the risk of data leaks without excessive QC processes, and their support team was underwhelming. “Their embedding looked good on the surface, but it was not reliable underneath to manage.

With Holistics, he saw how different embedding could be.

At that point, Datacubed Health was already growing fast. Their platform collected real-time patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) for decentralized clinical trials and delivered insights to Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies across the US, EU, and China. With expansion came higher expectations from customers and regulators. To keep pace, the team needed another embedded BI tool that was flexible and reliable, but also capable of meeting strict standards for compliance and data isolation.

After a careful, comprehensive evaluation, Datacubed Health chose Holistics.

Since migrating to Holistics' embedded analytics platform, DataCubed Health has been able to deliver compliant, real-time insights to pharmaceutical customers while reducing costs and improving system reliability.

When Vikram said Holistics "built embedding in from the start", he meant it.

Most BI tools he evaluated were built for internal analytics, with embedding added later. Holistics started from the opposite premise. Its pricing, permissioning, ease of implementation, and deployment model were designed from day one for products that deliver analytics at scale.

Those differences became clear as Vikram compared Holistics against other embedded BI platforms across four key pillars:

• Compliance Requirements: Region-based data isolation (US, EU, and China), HIPAA and GDPR alignment, and fine-grained permission controls were essential. Any slip here risked breaching regulatory trust and losing pharmaceutical clients.
• Ease of Maintenance: They needed a system that wouldn’t break with every upgrade or require constant fixes. This frees the BI team to focus on delivering insights instead of maintaining the platforms.
• Feature-ready Embedding: Nearly all customers accessed dashboards through Datacubed’s own portal. Embedding couldn’t be an afterthought; it had to be seamless, customizable, and secure out of the box.
• Embedded-Friendly Economics: With growth came rising usage. Licensing models based on named users were incompatible with Datacubed’s embedded delivery model. The new platform had to scale with queries and customers, not penalize internal teams.

Having used Holistics in a previous role, Vikram was already familiar with the platform's capabilities. This prior experience, combined with Holistics meeting all the criteria needed for embedded analytics in healthcare BI, made it the clear choice for addressing their specific pain points.

In pharma and clinical research, every customer demanded clear boundaries for where their data lived. For Datacubed, this translated into one of their biggest challenges: data isolation by region, enforced at both the infrastructure and application levels.

Datacubed needed an embedded BI platform that could guarantee that their PII data for their European data stays in Europe, and those built for the U.S. do not leave their U.S. data center. At the same time, row and column-level permissions had to be granular enough to reduce the risk of data leakage between different customers within the same environment without the need to duplicate multiple dashboards to be shared as standalone silos.

Holistics aligned well with these compliance demands, equipping Datacubed with features that respected regional boundaries and enforced isolation without forcing the team into workarounds:

• No-Persistence Security Architecture: Holistics doesn’t persist raw customer data on its servers. All queries run live against the customer’s own warehouse, and only temporary query results are cached, automatically expiring after a set period.
• Regional Isolation: Ability to maintain strict data boundaries across different geographic regions.
• Multi-Environment Deployment: Flexible deployment with cost-effective pricing for non-production environments and Git-based code synchronization across regions. Because all analytics logic is defined as code and stored in version control, the team could build once and deploy across multiple environments with full traceability.

The same embedding-first design philosophy extended into access control.

This approach also shaped how Holistics handled access control. Instead of static, hardcoded permissions, Holistics lets teams manage row and column-level access dynamically through APIs.

Even the best features don’t matter if the system can’t stay online, and every change comes with a maintenance tax. For Datacubed, this was one of the most painful gaps in their previous BI tool: the constant upkeep.

The previous platform relied heavily on a GUI-only interface for BI development, which made it nearly impossible to enforce good practices. Without version control, every change was a manual operation: error-prone, hard to track, and fragile across upgrades.

Holistics eliminated much of this burden by design.

Instead of trapping BI development inside a GUI, Holistics offers Git-governed change management, letting analysts define metrics, datasets, and dashboards as code. This brought Datacubed’s BI work into the same discipline as software engineering: proper code reviews to maintain quality, version history for every change, and the ability to roll back if needed. Pre-deployment validation ensured consistency across dashboards, data fields, and models, catching errors before they reached production.

After moving to Holistics, Datacubed’s BI team could deliver that assurance consistently and finally shift its focus back to creating value for customers instead of firefighting outages.

Pricing was another pain point that drove Datacubed away from their previous BI tool. The platform’s licensing model was based on named users, an awkward fit for a company whose customers primarily accessed dashboards through embedded portals. Even though hundreds of pharma users viewed reports, only a handful ever logged into the BI tool directly.

Yet, Datacubed still had to pay for expensive user licenses, and each additional environment (development, QA, UAT, production) carried a steep cost.

As Vikram explained, the mismatch created unnecessary pressure:

Holistics offered a simpler model.

Instead of charging for user seats, pricing is scaled by usage, with unlimited embedded viewers included by default. Non-production environments for development or QA could be provisioned at half the cost of production, keeping multi-region deployments financially sustainable.

Holistics offered a simpler, usage-based model that fits naturally with Datacubed’s delivery model—charging for query executions and warehouse activity, not human logins. This meant embedded viewers could scale indefinitely without inflating cost structures.

"Most vendors still price as if embedding is an edge case," Vikram said. "They charge per user or per instance, which just doesn’t scale."

Holistics’ usage-based model fits naturally with Datacubed’s delivery model, charging for query executions and warehouse activity, not human logins. It meant embedded viewers could scale indefinitely without inflating cost structures.

For Noe Ocampo, Senior BI Engineer at Datacubed, the difference was clear from day one.

Holistics kept embedding simple, fast, and reliable. It allowed Datacubed to deliver role-based, region-aware, and fully customizable dashboards inside their application, without juggling extra user licenses or rebuilding logic for every client.

Once the team committed to Holistics, the transition was fast and focused. Unlike the previous tool, where setup often dragged into weeks of configuration and plugin workarounds, Holistics lets Datacubed hit the ground running.

Holistics also made it easier for the team to deliver custom dashboards without compromising scalability. With their previous BI tool, layout constraints and component limitations had made each build feel fragile and time-consuming.

For a company serving Fortune 100 and 500 pharmaceutical clients, those wins matter. Holistics turned embedding from a maintenance liability into a scalable, governed, and visually flexible embedded system, helping Datacubed focus less on patching tools and more on delivering insights that move clinical research forward.