BambooHR helps over 30,000 organizations across 190 countries confidently manage the entire HR lifecycle. As those customers grew and their needs became more complex, BambooHR saw an opportunity to evolve its in-app analytics, giving their customers deeper visibility into their data with robust customization and AI workflows to drive engagement and value.
With a clear vision for more flexible, in-app analytics, BambooHR evaluated whether to build in-house or partner with a vendor to accelerate delivery. They chose Omni to help bring that vision to life by launching a new Elite analytics tier, providing customers with a modernized reporting experience.
“We knew data could be a compelling reason for customers to spend more time engaging in our product. Omni helped us transform our in-app analytics into a differentiated, customized experience — without requiring our engineering team to go build a BI product ourselves.”Thomas Stockham, Senior Product Manager, Data & AI
Results #
Launched a new Elite analytics product tier in 4 months, enabling self-serve reporting for 30K+ people at launch before quickly growing to 100K+ people
Implemented robust permission controls that support BambooHR’s strict security needs
Boosted customer reporting satisfaction by 15%+ compared to their legacy in-app reporting experience
Created paths to increased engagement & upsells with customization that enables customers to build exactly what they need
Reduced engineering overhead & freed teams to focus on product differentiation and AI workflows
Data stack #
The challenge #
BambooHR has always offered reporting capabilities for critical compliance use cases like payroll, tax filings, and government audits. But as their customer base grew, expectations evolved. Many BambooHR customers wanted to go beyond standard tables to explore data, build custom visualizations and dashboards, and share insights without relying on exports into other tools.
“Reporting consistently came up as one of our top feature requests,” explains Thomas. “We wanted to build analytics that felt as polished and powerful as the rest of our platform.”
As BambooHR prepared to introduce new product packaging, the team saw analytics as a lever for competitive differentiation. In addition to ramping existing tiers, they envisioned a new Elite tier with advanced reporting capabilities as the centerpiece, designed for fast-growing customers with increasingly complex data needs.
To deliver on that vision, BambooHR had to decide whether to invest time and resources into building an analytics platform in-house or partnering with a vendor to launch more quickly. However, building in-house would pull significant engineering resources away from core product differentiation for months, if not years.
Ultimately, they decided a partner would allow them to deliver more to their customers faster.
The evaluation process #
BambooHR evaluated several vendors, including Visier, Sigma, GoodData, and Qlik. While some tools offered robust backend capabilities or industry-specific templates, none delivered on the combination of backend flexibility, frontend control, and implementation speed the team required.
“We had a lot of technically complex backend functionality requirements, but maintaining a cohesive BambooHR experience was non-negotiable. It’s important to us that our in-app analytics feel like a natural extension of the product, not like an add-on,” says Thomas.
During BambooHR's detailed evaluation, Omni stood out for:
Speed to market: BambooHR’s product and data teams could use Omni’s built-in semantic layer to define metrics once, then reuse and maintain them across all customers. ”The ease of data modeling and deployment with Omni means that our product managers can build and ship something new for customers on their own. That’s huge!” exclaims Thomas.
Customization: Omni allows for full design control to ensure a cohesive brand experience across the platform. Additionally, BambooHR could tailor each customer environment with custom fields using Omni’s model extension API. By handling this programmatically, they can offer customers a bespoke experience without needing to manually update each data model, ensuring they can scale to meet growing demand.
Performance at scale: To meet the expectations of the 30K+ customer organizations, BambooHR has strict performance and scalability SLAs. The team worked closely with Omni’s engineering team to perform extensive load testing to ensure the platform would be fast for every customer.
Security & permissions: BambooHR requires granular, field-level security to ensure that sensitive data is masked or exposed at the individual cell level, without sacrificing performance. “Our permissions model is incredibly granular,” explains Thomas. “Most tools couldn’t even come close to supporting it. The Omni team rolled up their sleeves and helped us design something performant and secure.”
But what truly cemented the decision was the relationship. From the first Slack thread to regular check-ins, Omni’s team embedded themselves in BambooHR’s success — reviewing mockups together, validating architecture decisions, and quickly iterating on requests.
“With Omni, we got a team that acted like an extension of ours. Given how substantial this launch was, that support was invaluable.”Thomas Stockham, Senior Product Manager, Data & AI
The migration #
After selecting Omni, BambooHR moved quickly. Thanks to close collaboration between teams, they exceeded their initial timeline goals and launched their beta to 120 customer accounts in just 3 months, with over 30,000 people gaining access. By month four, they went GA.
The successful rollout was a cross-functional effort across product, engineering, and data teams, all focused on delivering a seamless experience for customers. Together, they ensured the new analytics experience met BambooHR’s standards for performance, security, and usability at scale.
“Performance testing, permissions structures, even design patterns — we worked through all of it with the Omni team. It really felt like we were co-developing with them.”Thomas Stockham, Senior Product Manager, Data & AI
Throughout implementation, BambooHR tracked dozens of user experience requests in a shared spreadsheet for the Omni team. “We had product requests in a spreadsheet, and it’s been awesome to see the Omni team chip away at almost every one in record time,” shares Thomas.
The impact #
Turning analytics into an experience worth upgrading for
BambooHR’s new Elite analytics experience helps HR teams turn workforce data into actionable insights. Customers can go beyond static reports to build dashboards, explore data ad hoc, and create custom visualizations to understand key trends across their workforce.
“Many of our customers used to spend hours every week pulling reports into spreadsheets to give regular updates to their leadership teams,” explains Thomas. “Now, customers can build custom reports and dashboards in minutes and easily share trends and insights without ever leaving the BambooHR platform.”
In fact, customers report a 15% increase in satisfaction with analytics on the new Elite tier compared to their previous reporting. This has created a natural upsell path for teams ready to dive further into their analytics.
Next up, BambooHR is laying the groundwork for automated insights across the platform with AI. They’re using Omni’s MCP server to integrate Omni’s AI into their existing chatbot, so customers have one central place to ask questions.
“When the Omni team builds new features, our customers benefit without us needing to build it from scratch ourselves. For example, our customers love being able to upload CSVs and combine them with their analyses on our platform. We couldn’t achieve this speed of product development without Omni.”Thomas Stockham, Senior Product Manager, Data & AI
Enabling sales to lead with product differentiation
The new reporting experience has been a game-changer for sales. Now, BambooHR reps are confident saying yes to prospect and customer product requests that the legacy system couldn’t accomplish.
“Reporting is no longer just a box to check. It’s a reason to buy,” explains Thomas.
Now, analytics provide BambooHR with a clear advantage in a competitive market. Rather than racing to keep up with peers, they’ve used embedded analytics to leap ahead — offering something more interactive, intuitive, and extensible.
Accelerating engineering velocity and strategic focus
By partnering with Omni, BambooHR avoided the heavy lift of building and maintaining core analytics infrastructure internally. That freed up engineering resources to focus on what sets BambooHR apart from its competition.
“Instead of spending months rebuilding dashboards, we’re thinking about how to use AI to remove reporting work altogether. Our team is pushing the business forward because Omni has unlocked capacity for us.”Thomas Stockham, Senior Product Manager, Data & AI
Scaling analytics upgrades across all tiers
With the Elite launch complete and now serving insights to over 100,000 people, BambooHR is expanding its analytics revamp across the rest of the platform. The Pro tier will deliver curated dashboards and pre-built insights for key HR workflows, and the Core tier will provide essential reporting with a faster, more modern experience.
This tiered approach ensures that customers of all sizes and data maturity levels can benefit from the analytics in BambooHR’s platform. “Omni’s impact goes beyond fast charts. It helps us embed trust, usability, and insight at every level of the product,” concludes Thomas.