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GoodData Ups The Ante With Its Open Analytics Platform

Ben Kepes
Former Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
I cover how technology helps business compete.
This article is more than 10 years old.

The business intelligence space has traditionally been all about fat enterprise contracts, long consulting engagements and serious amount of firepower. Massive vendors like IBM , Microsoft , Oracle and SAP have BI offerings that (arguably) fall into this categorization. The cloud however changes much of that and morphs BI into a real time, stream based, API driven thing of beauty - delivering relevant insights about anything to anyone on whatever device they like. Or that's the pitch anyway, the reality is somewhat different and, while cloud BI has had some good wins primarily through alignment with other cloud applications, it hasn't really broken out into the general BI space.

Vendor GoodData hopes to change this with the announcement of their "Open Analytics Platform", an offering that is touted as being a "complete data governance and discovery platform-as-a-service". Tagging what they're doing with the PaaS acronym doesn't really gel with me - sure GoodData is offered as a service but then again so are most products these days. PaaS has a specific definition and I'm not sure it's helpful to have GoodData apply it to what they do. Anyway, as for what the company is doing, they're attempting to tie together structured and unstructured data across internal systems, cloud applications and the public sphere. This is kind of the holy grail for BI - for too long there has been a bit of a polarization between internal systems and external, between on-premises and cloud and between structured and unstructured - tying it all together is a logical reaction to what organizations actually need out of their data.

There's actually a valid pain point here - traditional BI is well known for being high-powered, but it's also known for lacking the flexibility to really adapt to changing business requirements. Forrester research has some interesting statistics to illustrate the problems with traditional systems - only 12% of data within an organization is actually used for analytics and over half of even the most simple BI requests take over a week to complete. Given this snail's pace approach to BI, clearly there's a need to do something radical. The idea of Good Data's Open Analytics Platform is that it covers the entire lifecycle of a BI project. Specific functional areas include:

  • Collection: Access data from both on-premise and cloud sources. The platform includes connectors and metadata maps for nearly 50 cloud-based sources as well as traditional and big data systems found within an organization’s firewall.
  • Storage: Maintain oversight and data governance. The platform features a dual-stage Data Storage Service (DSS) that stores raw data in a Hadoop-based system as well as a highly-scalable, clustered columnar warehouse for enriched, analysis-ready data.
  • Combination: Integrate and aggregate multiple sources. Data integration, workflow and aggregation occurs as logical data models are designed and subject-matter specific cubes are generated.
  • Analysis: Built-in statistics and analytics. The platform includes statistical functions and the ability to run analytic functions written in R directly within the database.
  • Visualization: Discovery-based solutions for users of all skills. GoodData adds visual analytic explorers to ad-hoc, custom and pre-built dashboard templates.

The company is offering this up to customers in two ways - firstly as a complete BI "stack" that enterprises can use to analyze their data and secondly as a white labeled product that can be embedded into other vendors own products. Probably the best example of this is Zendesk who use GoodData's platform to deliver a host of analytics for customers of its cloud based support product. According to GoodData, the split between white label and standard stack sales is roughly 50/50.

GoodData is adamant that only a cloud-based product can deliver the full BI stack in an integrated and scalable manner - that's probably a fair comment for most organizations that don't have the resources to obtain their own infrastructure of the quality that GoodData has - in particular the in-memory analytics that help deliver real-time insights.

Of course other vendors would suggest that even GoodData's approach is too heavy for lightweight, rapid fire cloud applications. Chart.io in particular is looking to reinvent BI in a very cut down, simple visualization way. The two products however work for different parts of the market and they both have their place.

The time has unquestionably come for BI to break out of its staid normalcy - vendors like GoodData with their cloud-first approach will help that to occur.

Ben Kepes
Ben Kepes