GoodData is a company trying to reinvent the way business analytics works. It is also one one a triumvirate of SaaS companies that started at roughly the same time and came to epitomize the second generation of cloud companies. Alongside NewRelic and Zendesk, GoodData was an exemplar for smart marketing, broad industry partnerships and high growth. Interestingly, GoodData is the only one of those three not yet to have gone through an IPO, something that founder Roman Stanek is undoubtedly trying to resolve.
Anyway, the company is today launching an upgrade to its analytics platform that aims to both ease business analytics and improve the experience for users. GoodData is introducing an analytical design tool and a data exploration tool to connect users to simpler processes and community best practices.
Essentially GoodData is harnessing the collective knowledge of its five years in the industry and the 50,000 or so analytics projects that have been run upon its platform. The new tools contextualize the business problem the user is trying to resolve, based upon source data and the insights from the collective intelligence of the historical queries on the platform. Not only should this speed up the time-to-value for analytics projects, but it should increase accuracy as institutional knowledge is applied to each distinct problem.
The need for this is articulated by Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson who stated:
When enterprise technology management can't deliver, business users build their own applications focusing on agility, flexibility, and reaction times. Alas, these noble efforts by non-technology professionals have their own set of challenges, and often result in applications and environments that do not scale, contribute to the proliferation of silos, take organizations farther from a single version of the truth, and pose high operational risk
The new GoodData tools aim to deliver the best of both worlds – end-user empowerment to run analytics, but a quality level created through machine-learned best practices. Rather than analytics simply repeating mistakes of the past, the idea here is to create a “network effect” of experience, best-practice and user behaviors.
Of course in isolation that all sounds great, but it is important to understand that GoodData doesn’t operate in a vacuum and much is happening in the general analytics space. In particular the rise of predictive analytics, where applications include the ability to gain insights on top of their own application data, is an emergent field. It doesn’t remove the need for tools like GoodData, but lessens the value BI platforms have, especially when analyzing single-source data.
Expect GoodData to keep rolling out the innovations, and experimenting with new ways to justify its existence – it seems to me that being an integration hub, and strongly articulating the value that a third-party platform can bring when analyzing multiple data sources, is key for this company.
