December 27, 2009

Introduction to Gooddata

Around the end of the Cold War, Esther Dyson took it upon herself to go repeatedly to Eastern Europe and do a lot of rah-rah and catalysis, hoping to spark software and other computer entrepreneurs. I don’t know how many people’s lives she significantly affected – I’d guess it’s actually quite a few – but in any case the number is not zero. Roman Stanek, who has built and sold a couple of software business, cites her as a key influence setting him on his path.

Roman’s latest venture is business intelligence firm Gooddata. Gooddata was founded in 2007 and has been soliciting and getting attention for a while, so I was surprised to learn that Gooddata officially launched just a few weeks ago. Anyhow, some less technical highlights of the Gooddata story include:

Gooddata technical highlights include:

Now we get to the good stuff. When I wrote about reinventing business intelligence back in May, I focused on some interesting developments I see as actually underway — at least on an experimental basis and/or from small vendors – namely:

Meanwhile, something I’ve been seeking for years, but haven’t seen much progress on since enhancement stopped on Cognos Metrics Manager, is more user-friendly metrics management. Well, it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but at least Gooddata has the basics – a list of already-defined metrics, and a reasonable way of compounding them into other metrics. I think that kind of thing will be a major BI feature going forward, to the point that a few years from now we’ll be worrying about how to port them from one BI vendor’s tool from another.

Bottom line: If you’re interested in BI, you should look at a Gooddata demo.

Comments

13 Responses to “Introduction to Gooddata”

  1. Jerome Pineau on December 28th, 2009 10:17 pm

    Curt, I believe the “A” in MAQL stands for “analytical” – as in multidimensional analytical query language 🙂

    Good piece!
    J.

  2. Todd Fin on December 28th, 2009 11:51 pm

    will this company survive with charging $500-$2,000/month? This is not like Salesforce in terms of volumes. Unless most of their people are working offshore and the burn rate is low or the business model simply to get acquired quickly ( which could be tough in today’s market)

  3. Jerome Pineau on December 29th, 2009 1:17 am

    @Todd,

    It all depends on the customer acquisition costs and the cost of actually running the systems which, using EC2, are shockingly low. I was myself quite surprised when I saw the numbers. Clearly, you need volume, but with a multi-tenant “switch flipping” approach to adding accounts, it’s quite cost effective. That’s the beauty of the “cloud” model when properly implemented and managed.
    Recall that SF didn’t start with a large volume either. So I’d venture to guess GD’s survivability is just as good, if not better, than most competitors both in the SaaS and other spaces. That’s just my opinion.

  4. Curt Monash on December 29th, 2009 4:14 am

    Todd,

    It all depends on whether Gooddata comes up with viable sales & marketing strategies.

    We can safely assume that Gooddata’s revenue goals are way more than the $100K/month they evidently haven’t reached yet.

  5. Daniel Lemire on December 29th, 2009 10:39 am

    If you like tag clouds and BI, then this paper of mine might be of interest to you:

    Kamel Aouiche, Daniel Lemire and Robert Godin, Web 2.0 OLAP: From Data Cubes to Tag Clouds, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing Vol. 18, pages 51-64, 2009

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2657

  6. Roman Stanek on December 29th, 2009 11:02 am

    Curt,

    “2500 “projects” at the end of beta and 100 more per month” is easy to explain by the scalability of our cloud. There are days when we get “techcrunched” and we provision several hundred projects in a day!

  7. Curt Monash on December 29th, 2009 12:13 pm

    Roman,

    My point was to wonder why your growth was so low. It looks like a big decline in absolute growth rate (for the free stuff, at least).

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