I am pleased to announce that integration between Cube and Steep is now available.

Steep is a modern analytics platform, powered by metrics, that changes how companies use data together. Available as a desktop, web and native mobile application, Steep provides a beautiful interface for teams to explore, compare and understand the metrics that are important to their business. In Steep, users simply browse available metrics and begin their analysis rather than starting with a complicated dashboard development process.

Metrics-first business intelligence

At Cube we are excited to partner with Steep because of our shared belief in a better way forward for analytics users by defining metrics once and reusing them many times, in different contexts. In older business intelligence softwares, users are forced to think in the constructs of databases - tables, columns and queries. This can put a lot of burden on users without strong backgrounds in database fundamentals and can reduce adoption of analytics within organizations. With their focus on metrics as a first class entity Steep empowers more users to engage with analytics by preventing them from having to think about queries, or more likely, to wait to be served by specialist members of a data team. Defining metrics once, in a semantic layer, keeps everyone on the same page and confident in the insights that are created. No more guessing if you’re using the same version of a dashboard as everyone else is!

More than traditional BI

After a semantic layer is defined in Cube, Steep connects via our REST API and all available metrics are immediately available to Steep users. Cube features like data modeling version control, two-tiered caching and pre-aggregation, and our long (and growing!) list of data sources are all available to Steep users. Cube users who add Steep to their data stack get a delightful self-service analytics experience that feels truly made for the semantic layer.

We have a webinar with the Steep team to walk through the integration and talk about the idea of metrics-first BI on January 16th, at 8am PST. Working with the Steep team to bring this integration to the world has been a wonderful experience and I hope that you will take a look and let us know what you think.