Hello Carles,
The easiest is to expose ThingWorx data via HTTP, but you would soon run into performance and security limitations. It looks OK for proof-of-concepts, but doesn't really work in prod, where you have a lot of data, your users want single-sign-on, and BI engine tries to DOS your platform by triggering hundreds of queries, which ThingWorx can't throttle intelligently.
So the proper way to do it is to push data into some external data source. The exact details vary on available infrastructure and your use cases. An external RDBMS exposed via JDBC is probably the most reasonable default option to consider.
Probably the most advanced thing you can do is wrap some data loading SDK provided by your BI (all of them have one) into a ThingWorx extension, and use it to push data directly into BI's own storage, where it will be stored in the native BI format. Here it largely depends on the SDK capabilities. For example, Tableau Server doesn't support modifying existing data and only allows to append it (or at least that's how it used to work a couple of years ago). That's something to consider before embarking on this journey.
We tried all three approaches, and the third one worked best for us. It is slightly harder to implement, but gives you the best performance and long-term scalability. You are paying the price by getting vendor-locked, obviously, since there are no standards there.
Embedding BI web UI into mashups is another story, it's also perfectly doable via other set of SDKs, but also requires writing extensions (at least if you want to do BI filtering, change report pages, highlight something, etc. from your mashups). Same story about SSO for web UI -- it's doable via javascript extensions without too much effort.
That all may sound rather complex, but we're talking about a couple of weeks of work for an experienced ThingWorx developer, and the technical risks are quite low.
Regards,
Constantine
