We’re happy to announce our latest customer: Market Metrix. They are a SaaS provider of survey, customer satisfaction and loyalty services, focused exclusively on the hotel and hospitality industry, serving many of the big hotel chains around the world. Market Metrix is the trusted expert in customer sat and loyalty for many hotel brands, and have a tremendous amount of valuable data they deliver to their clients.

Here’s a quick example of the power GoodData brings to Market Metrix and their customers. When a hotel sees a low customer satisfaction score, they want to dig in and find out why. Is it a bad room? A bad breakfast? A bad employee? Is it a trend? Are women unhappy with certain services? Do ‘gold’ loyalty card members have higher or lower satisfaction? Or is it a bigger or more systemic issue.

In the example below – in just a few clicks – this hotel figured out that the underlying issue was directly tied to reservation source. People booking through Amadeus were unhappy. This is real actionable information.

For the first time, hotel marketers and property owners have access to this business data, and can use GoodData to slice and dice their customer sat data themselves quickly. They don’t need analytics experts on staff, or to rely on external consultants to sift through the numbers.

Hotels get a deeper sense of customer sat and loyalty, and Market Metrix gets customers that interact with their data on a daily basis.

Click on the image below to see a bigger version

Customer Satisfaction Analytics in GoodData

You can hear more about Market Metrix and how they are using GoodData on an upcoming webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST.

GoodData announced its first ISV customer, Market Metrix, a leading provider of software-as-a-service based customer satisfaction and loyalty data to more than 100 enterprises across lodging, car rental, airlines and allied fields. Market Metrix has licensed GoodData to give its hospitality clients deeper insights into the customer data that drives their businesses. GoodData provides the ability to build custom dashboards and reports, via an easy-to-use interface directly within Market Metrix’s existing customer portal.

“Our hospitality customers have an insatiable desire to better understand data around customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said Robert Honeycutt, CEO of Market Metrix. “GoodData lets us give them a powerful tool to dig deeper, understand trends and capture more of the story behind the metrics.”

With GoodData’s customer analytics solutions, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers like Market Metrix can easily and affordably enhance their existing services with on-demand dashboards, reporting and analytics. SaaS providers can create highly repeatable analytics applications that provide a low-friction way to address increasing customer requirements for reporting and analytics.

“The economics of BI are broken for SaaS providers: too complex to build, too expensive to buy,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “GoodData brings the economic advantages of the cloud to SaaS providers, letting them embed powerful analytics at a fraction of the cost.”

Join Keith Jaeger, Vice President of Product Development at Market Metrix on a webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST as he discusses the challenges of SaaS analytics and the opportunity for SaaS providers to work with GoodData. You can register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/816928338.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Market Metrix
Market Metrix has been helping leading hospitality companies turn feedback into performance since 1996. Combining award–winning research with powerful products, Market Metrix gives clients essential information, guidance and tools to make informed business decisions. Software–as–a–Service (SaaS) based products help clients save money, improve guest and employee loyalty and gain control over the new social media wave.

GoodData’s technology, management philosophy, and “market-disruptive price point” have helped Enterasys drive more business value from IT.

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Read more at InformatonWeek

In my last post, I wrote about how we are building our own metrics-driven business at GoodData. We’ve got a vision, plenty of data, and a plan for Agile BI. Now I’d like to talk about 2 things – first the metrics that matter for GoodData, and second where we are in building our own GoodData Customer Analytics project.

The Metrics That Matter
Similar to many b2b web companies, we have a hybrid business. GoodData is both bought and sold. What this means is that there are essentially three sets of metrics that matter for us:

1. Web & Conversion. Google Analytics (traffic) plus registration stats (conversion) from our platform. Mashing up Google Analytics with our own platform stats gives us great conversion data.
2. Leads and Opportunities. Standard marketing and sales analytics – total number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads), SQLs (sales qualified leads), and opportunity pipeline tracked by stage. Most of this data is inside Salesforce – and we’re already pretty good at Salesforce CRM Analytics
3. Product Usage. As a SaaS business, we have a tremendous amount of telemetry around customer usage of our product. Getting a hold of this data can turn me into a true data-driven marketer.

Here’s a really basic example of the type of telemetry we get out of GoodData;

Our First Two Sprints
We’ve had a GoodData project with basic web, conversion and product usage data for about 9 months, which has helped us shift from anecdotes to facts when we talk about what works in our business. In 2010, the first big win for us is to incorporate our Salesforce CRM data – so we can look at all 3 categories of metrics I listed above. More important is to see product usage data from the customer’s perspective – which leads, opportunities or accounts are using which parts of our product. Once we mash up Salesforce and usage stats, we’ll be able to market and sell at a much more efficient manner.

When I say agile, I mean it: sprint #1 started February 1st and will be done by the end of February.

Please tell me what you’d like to hear about in my next post.

Listen to Peter Schooff at ebizQ’s podcast with Roman Stanek, the CEO and Founder of GoodData, a company dedicated to BI in the Cloud. In the podcast Peter and Roman discuss BI in the cloud, why it’s so difficult, why BI has a bad reputation with some companies, and finally, Roman defines success in BI.

Download the podcast here or check out ebizQ to read the transcript.

GoodData allows you to analyze data on the fly and create reports and dashboards out of them. More often then not, these reports end up being projected onto a wall as part of a meeting. I’ve seen some people switch back and forth between the presentation screen and the browser. It is however quite easy to use GoodData dashboards directly inside your PowerPoint presentation.

You’ll need to download a plugin for PowerPoint called LiveWeb (choose the version corresponding to your PowerPoint). Upon downloading and decompressing, double-click the LiveWeb.ppam to install the plugin.

Let’s switch for a while to a GoodData dashboard. In the upper-left corner next to the dashboard name is a Share link. Click it and find the text snippet with the HTML code. You will need to copy the address of this dashboard which is enclosed in quotes following “src” attribute. View this screenshot to see what I mean:

Copy the text highlighted between the quotes as the address to your dashboard

Back in your PowerPoint presentation, find the Insert tab. Thanks to your new PowerPoint plugin, it should now feature a Web Page button for embedding web into your presentations:

Click it, and paste the dashboard address into the first field. Don’t forget to click the Add button, then click Next to proceed, leave the settings unchanged and click Finish.

Your presentation should now contain a big black box as a placeholder for the web page. The real dashboard is going to display only once you start running the presentation fullscreen. It is a good idea to run it once before you present – the first time the dashboard displays it will ask for your GoodData login. You can then exit/enter the presentation and dashboard again without needing to enter your password – until you exit PowerPoint completely.

GoodData announced this week that we are formally working with Talend to make it easier to get all different types of data into GoodData. In press release-ese, here’s what it says:

Talend makes data integration a seamless piece of GoodData’s customer analytics offerings, allowing companies to focus on building the reports and dashboards that bring metrics front-and-center in their business, as opposed to solving low-level integration issues.

So what does this mean for GoodData customers:

1. Talend powers GoodData for Salesforce — this is mostly invisible to customers who buy our GoodData for Salesforce apps for marketing, sales and customer support analytics, since GoodData loads the data automatically on behalf of our customers
2. A GoodData connector for Talend is now a freely available on Talend Exchange, which means you can use Talend as an easy (and free) on-ramp for bringing practically any data into our Cloud BI platform
3. Stay tuned for more news about GoodData’s data integration architecture. Big things are coming in 2010….

For more about loading data into GoodData, how-to videos, understanding our APIs, or tips to work with GoodData, please visit our support forums. Of course, you can always sign in an try GoodData for free.

Connects to Salesforce CRM Data; Connector Freely Available on Talend Exchange

GoodData today announced that the Talend Integration Suite is deployed as an integral component of GoodData for Salesforce. Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, enables GoodData to automate the regular collection of data from Salesforce CRM for companies to perform marketing, sales and customer service analytics.

Talend makes data integration a seamless piece of GoodData’s customer analytics offerings, allowing companies to focus on building the reports and dashboards that bring metrics front-and-center in their business, as opposed to solving low-level integration issues.

“Everyone knows that data integration is a critical success factor for SaaS business intelligence,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “Talend takes data integration off the table for our Salesforce CRM customers – now they analyze their data in only a few hours.”

GoodData has published its connector on Talend Exchange, providing developers and existing Talend users another easy on-ramp for bringing practically any data into Cloud Business Intelligence. Combining a free open-source integration tool with GoodData’s easy-to-use and free-to-start analytics service removes two major hurdles to business intelligence adoption.

“The open source model clearly provides the highest flexibility and performance for businesses of all types,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend’s vice president and general manager, Americas. “We are happy to see Talend’s leading edge data integration technology being adopted and embedded by SaaS providers such as GoodData to power their offerings, and accelerate their deployment.”

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at http://www.gooddata.com.

About Talend
Talend is the recognized market leader in open source data integration. More than 1,000 paying customers around the globe, including Yahoo!, Virgin Mobile, Sony and Swiss Life, use the Talend Integration Suite of products and services to optimize the costs of data integration, ETL and data quality. With more than seven million lifetime downloads and 1.5 million core product downloads, Talend’s solutions are the most widely used and deployed data integration solutions in the world. The company has major offices in North America, Europe and Asia, and a global network of technical and services partners. For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

Step 1: A Simple Plan

Here at GoodData, Customer Analytics is more than a good marketing spin, it’s how we will manage our business. We know that focusing on the metrics that drive our business is the key. Plus, we are inspired by three of our early customers – Enterasys Networks, TriNet and Gazelle – both of which embed analytics (and of course GoodData dashboards) throughout their core businesses. These companies have it in their DNA, from their leaders down to the front line sales, marketing and service folks.

We have come to realize that living the life of a metrics-driven business is deceptively challenging. Even as a startup – without too many people and processes, we are still awash in data and opinions as to which are the ones that really matter. Not to sound too Zen, but I firmly believe that Customer Analytics is about the practice, and not a magic destination or customer insight. After all, despite the promises of BI marketing for generations, metrics don’t make the decisions for you. That’s your job.

l will be blogging about GoodData’s journey to becoming a metrics-driven business as we dig deeper into the practice of customer analytics, throughout 2010 and beyond.

All we need to get going is a vision, some data and a simple plan:

• A Vision: we are fortunate to have a company culture that revolves around data (it helps to be an analytics vendor). We’ve seemingly always had a few GoodData projects with our Google Analytics and product stats in it. But honestly it’s been a back-burner effort as we built the platform and started the business. It took our founder Roman to really kick-start the effort. Look at this report that he created a few weeks back, nothing too fancy, but no one did it until he did. The next day, 4 or 5 other employees started analyzing the same data, and now we’re doing it with more focus and energy. Lesson learned: nothing helps drive a culture around data better leaders being metrics-driven themselves.

GoodData User Trends

• Some Data: even as a startup, we have plenty of customer data. Our mix of customer data comes from our website, our business apps (Salesforce CRM and ZenDesk), and most powerfully GoodData itself. We’ve instrumented our platform to capture the metadata that surrounds our customer interactions. Put into English: we can track when customers engage in our product, what features they use, where they struggle, when they abandon, when they load data, create reports, build dashboards, invite co-workers, and when GoodData becomes viral. That’s a lot of data….

Customer Analytics Data Sources

• A Simple Plan: So much data, so many neat and valuable ways to slice and dice it, let me write up the requirements and get our ops guys to get going on pulling the data in. I already know this will fail. Before I know it, the project will crumble from its own complexity. Sadly, I’ve been in too many Spruce Goose projects before around customer data. Here at GoodData, we are taking our success with agile development [production releases every two weeks] and applying it to customer analytics. So my simple plan is just to define a few sprints and get going.

In my next post I plan to talk a bit more about the simple metrics that matter to us, and talk about the first few sprints that we’ve defined.

Please let me know what you would like to hear about.

Listen to Sam Boonin, GoodData’s VP Marketing on the Cloud Computing Show. Pretty fun podcast with Gary Orenstein about Cloud BI and how to get started with analytics in your company.

You can download the podcast here, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or visit the Cloud Computing Show blog.

TriNet is one of the country’s leading PEOs (professional employer organizations), serving as the trusted HR advisor for thousands of companies nationwide. It’s critical for TriNet is to run a high-performance sales & marketing machine to meet its aggressive business goals. And metrics are at the center of this effort.

Come hear from Tina Babbi, Executive Director of Field Operations at TriNet about her passion for building a metrics-driven sales organization. Learn how TriNet is using GoodData for Salesforce to deliver customized reports and dashboards to regional sales managers, sales operations and TriNet executives.

During this webinar, you will learn how clients like TriNet use GoodData to:

• Collect and analyze the data that drive your sales process
• Apply the expertise and best practices of GoodData’s customers into your company
• Understand how to measure marketing’s impact into the sales and revenue pipeline
• Put metrics front-and-center in your sales regions through interactive dashboards

Title: The Metrics Behind TriNet’s Sales Success
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

Checkout GoodData for Salesforce, and learn how companies are leveraging GoodData’s cloud BI platform to perform customer analytics.

• Access and question the data that surrounds your customer relationships
• Track key metrics and ensure that every customer-facing employee lives by them
• Report on customer relationships and dig deeper to analyze the story behind the numbers

Here are a few images of GoodData for Salesforce to whet your appetite — click on the images to view larger versions:

Martin Man – an iPhone developer – is using GoodData to track the success of his iPhone apps, it’s yet another cool way to use GoodData, and a great example of Customer Analytics at its best! In his words:

As an Apple iPhone Developer I would like to know how my applications are selling around the world, where my users and customers are, where to put focus, and what localizations to work on next.

Screenshots below – and his blog post includes a pretty easy cookbook to do the same thing yourself. Check it out here

On-Demand Dashboards for Salesforce.com Provide Metrics for Sales & Marketing Success

GoodData today announced that TriNet, a provider of payroll, benefits and human resources outsourcing solutions to small businesses, has rolled out GoodData for Salesforce to its sales regions throughout the United States. GoodData provides on-demand reporting and analysis for Salesforce CRM marketing, sales and service data, enabling TriNet to trend its sales pipeline over time, analyze customer data across modules and visualize results with customized reports and dashboards.

“We believe that marketing and sales teams are successful when metrics are front-and-center to the operations process,” said Tina Babbi, Executive Director of Field Operations at TriNet. “We were losing two days every month analyzing our data and sharing it only once per month. GoodData’s real-time dashboards enable us to distribute information to the point where it’s actionable by our teams.”

TriNet has successfully deployed the GoodData for Salesforce sales analytics application, which connects to TriNet’s Salesforce CRM system, provides daily ‘snapshots’ of pipeline change, and leverages more than two years of historical data – all to deliver customized reports and dashboards to regional sales managers, sales operations and TriNet executives. GoodData ensures that all stakeholders have a current and comprehensive view into sales activity: sales regions have actionable insight into their sales pipeline, executives gain visibility into sales performance, and sales operations can identify trends and adjust sales strategy quickly. Any stakeholder can easily drill down to discover the story behind the numbers.

“I have spent my career as a business operations professional, and GoodData is the best fit for our teams to quickly access the analytics we need to run our business,” added Babbi. “Everybody talks about it, but GoodData really delivers.”

“TriNet is a very sophisticated and discerning customer for sales analytics,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “Helping their sales team focus on the right opportunities is a big win for our company.”

Based on the success of sales analytics, TriNet is now deploying GoodData for Salesforce marketing analytics application to report on leads and campaigns, optimize programs spend, and drive alignment between sales and marketing.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About TriNet
TriNet serves as a trusted HR partner to small businesses, to help contain costs, minimize employer-related risks, relieve administrative burden, and keep focus on core business functions. From routine employee benefits service and payroll processing to high-level human capital consulting, TriNet’s PEO expertise is integrated with every facet of a client’s organization. Its solutions specialize in serving fast-moving companies in fields such as technology and professional services, who recognize that top-quality employees are their most critical competitive asset. For more information, please visit http://www.trinet.com.

Watch Roman Stanek, GoodData CEO and Founder, give a 6-minute overview of GoodData, the Business Intelligence Market, and why why cloud computing gives us a great opportunity for disruption.

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.

Read more of Curt Monash’s Introduction to GoodData at DBMS2

I continue to be very excited and encouraged by recent developments in enterprise business intelligence. Despite a recent global downturn in software sales, many BI dashboard vendors and solutions providers, both large and small, have aggressively accelerated their pace of innovation and service offerings. Over the last year, I was fortunate enough to meet with the leaders behind some of the more cutting-edge BI solutions and discuss in detail their company’s unique vision and value proposition for BI. What impressed me about these companies was not only the innovative quality and value (functionality/price) of their solutions portfolio, but the industry thought leadership that emanated from their senior management. The business intelligence industry continues to retain a brilliant knowledge-trust that is bent on breaking new ground in BI and transforming it for the better.

GoodData

GoodData has drastically lowered the barrier of entry into business intelligence by providing a cloud-based service that is scalable, flexible and affordable.  The inspiration behind GoodData is simple: Business intelligence should no longer be viewed as a luxury good – available only to large companies with the budget to shop at the IT equivalent of a Mercedes Benz dealer.  Every company, regardless of market capitalization, must have the ability to access, analyze and report, and distribute the data (in an infinite number of permutations) on which their business runs.  And yet outside of Fortune 1000 companies, BI still has a very small market penetration.  Because of this unequal access to BI, GoodData’s founder and CEO, Roman Stanek, was inspired to apply the emerging economics of cloud computing to BI service delivery, making it available to a much wider audience.

Read more of the article here

Christmas, Charles Bridge – Prague, Czech Republic

We wanted to take a minute and wish our community Happy Holidays and thank you for an eventful year. From our beta launch at the end of 2008 to our seed round of funding in April, through our first production release in July to our company launch in November: it’s been a year full of accomplishment.

In this time, we have seen GoodData grown through new UI design, extended data management tools, new dashboards and charting libraries, and dedicated products such as GoodData for NetSuite and GoodData for Salesforce. We started the year with a small group of early beta customers, and will end it with over 2,500 trial projects. Thank you for your support!

• Christmas came early for GoodData. In case you haven’t heard, we were recently named winner of the third annual Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge. GoodData was selected from over 1,000 entries as the startup building the most impressive business in the cloud on Amazon Web Services. We are thrilled that Amazon and the emerging cloud computing community recognize the potential Cloud BI has to move analytics from being a luxury good available only to the richest companies to something that every company can use to make better business decisions. Learn more here, watch the company overview video, see the winning presentation, or view a webcast of the final event.

• Thanks to all who participated in the GoodData for Salesforce webinar! We had a great interactive session and enjoyed hearing your great questions and feedback. In case you missed it, a video of the webinar is now available on our website. Contact us to schedule a 30-day free trial with your Salesforce data – we can get you live in one week.

• Lastly, we at GoodData want to wish all of you a very happy holiday season. We wish health and happiness in the upcoming year and hope you spend a wonderful holiday with family and loved ones. See you in 2010!

Happy Holidays!
The GoodData Team

Recently (as in, yesterday afternoon) I took on a flurry of SaaS BI related questions on Twitter from fellow BI technologist Justin Swanhart pertaining to data safety and integration issues in SaaS BI. His questions were excellent ones (as usual) but I didn’t feel Twitter had enough bandwidth to properly address them. Consequently, I’d like to do so on what I call an “instablog” – This is a quick “follow-up” blog post motivated by the need to expand a discussion or Q&A session seeded on a social media site like Twitter. Once done, I will post this blog address on Twitter and hopefully, everyone can benefit from and comment on the exchange.

Justin’s initial twit was “How can you be absolutely sure your data is secure in a SaaS environment?”. To which I promptly replied “define absolutely”. My reply wasn’t meant to be a wisenheimer (well, ok maybe just a little), but notwithstanding marketing hooplah, few things are really “absolutely sure” in the realm of security. And one engineer’s “absolutely” is another’s “maybe”. Luckily Justin pursued with “How can I be reasonably sure? Is my data encrypted? How do I ensure SaaS employees don’t see my data, let alone malware?”. Re-phrased that way, the question is a tad easier to tackle. And I can certainly address this from a GoodData perspective.

Understandably, data protection and safekeeping is the number one concern most people have with SaaS. And no security mechanism can ensure data safety 100%, no matter what certain vendors will claim. The best case scenario is indeed a certain level of “reasonable” assurance. In my opinion, it’s all about risk level management and fomenting trust among parties.

When you entrust information to a SaaS vendor, there are typically two vulnerability zones: when it is traveling on the wire, and when it is stored inside the cloud. In bodyguard parlance, those are called kill zones. GoodData protects information on the wire by encrypting it (as Justin mentions) using standard SSL encryption over HTTP. And once inside the EC2 cloud, data benefits from enterprise-class protection mechanisms inherent to the Amazon cloud platform, which has recently attained SAS 70 Type II certification. So if you feel that EC2 provides “reasonable” assurance of data safety, then all is well on that front. Could Amazon EC2 get hacked? Sure, why not. But considering the level and sophistication of techniques used by Amazon to secure its cloud, I’m willing to bet it’s a lot easier to hack your enterprise’s data silos than punching a hole in EC2. And your data is probably safer inside EC2 than inside your own organization.

That being said, a great percentage of enterprise security breaches are linked to malicious insider jobs. So Justin’s question about employee vetting is appropriate. At GoodData, every employee goes through a background check. This is standard fare (or at least should be) for all responsible SaaS vendors. More importantly, no customer data ever resides on any GoodData premises (as a matter of fact, we don’t own a single server in the company). Additionally, there are 24/7 internal mechanisms (both manual and automated) monitoring and logging all usage. We run dedicated pattern-matching software to flag unusual behavior and activity. And without going into excessive proprietary details for obvious reasons, I like to think it’s harder for suspicious activity to go unchallenged at GoodData than finding a good American Martini in Prague (been there done that). Additional pertinent details regarding GoodData security are posted here.

Justin also followed up with “Is SaaS even an option when there are draconian security policies for specific pieces of data?” The honest answer to this, from my perspective, is a flat out “no”. To me, “draconian” means there is some specific legal industry regulation or compliance rule (government or corporate) that cannot be breached. In this case, you simply cannot use SaaS. It’s that simple. And trying to convince the public of the contrary is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Fact is, some data is simply not meant for the cloud, and I wish more vendors would admit that plain and simple.

Last but not least, Justin asked “And is there any reasonably easy way to integrate SaaS and OSBI tools if I can only ship some of my data around?” – This is a great question that transcends the “religious” aspects of both approaches. Beyond the fact that OSBI users are unlikely to simultaneously use SaaS BI tools and vice-versa, is there a technical best practice recommendation for doing so? Personally, I’ve not encountered one and thinking through it is challenging at best. I am still mulling it.

At issue is querying both private and “clouded” islands of data simultaneously. But where should results live? Are aggregates as protected as detailed data? Should query content also be protected? Can results be pulled back from the cloud and then integrated with local ones? Can you slice and dice on both local and remote dimensions? Can this be done quickly enough in real time? Certainly, you can export GoodData reports into Excel and then use those results internally. Better yet, you can use the REST API to automatically grab report results (the actual data) in YAML and integrate those into your on-premise tool (whether OSS or not). So my inclination would be to suggest that it is indeed possible to integrate some aspects of both platforms, albeit not easily (that’s the “reasonable” part), and likely with limitations – I’d love to see a set of requirements though, because this sounds like a really compelling, challenging, “front-line” project.

I want to thank Justin for taking the time to think of and post these challenging questions on Twitter and look forward to “instablogging” many more in the future with your help. To look up the above-mentioned twits, you can do a search on @gooddata, @jswanhart or @jeromepineau.

In his famous piece, The Art of Evangelism, Guy Kawasaki writes “Look for agnostics, ignore atheists”. This is particularly relevant to my recent blog post describing the harrowing experience of Open Source BI (OSBI). In it, I point out that OSBI does indeed work for a vast number of very specific users, but most OSS-minded readers skipped right over that statement and interpreted my post as a blind bashing of OSS in favor of SaaS BI. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For if my intent were indeed to “convert” OSBI users to a SaaS approach, it would make me naive and likely frustrated. Because I strongly believe in Seth Godin’s golden rule that you cannot change people’s worldview. Attempts to do so, especially in the technology realm, have too often proven futile. Especially since Open Source, in my opinion, is really more of a religion than a technology per se. You either have the faith, or you don’t. And these are not waters I wish to fish in.

No, what I am after are the people who are still on the fence between OSBI and SaaS. The decision makers still trying to map out the “right” BI strategy. The developers, consultants, business people and C-level leaders who seek a roadmap to what platforms and approaches are good long-term business investments. In these matters, technology is but one of many factors. At stake: job security, competitive advantage, and long-term business survival. Let me see if I can provide a little direction.

My first inclination is to describe typical users in each community. Because, if the profile fits your own organizational or personal traits, then chances are this is your camp. Here’s what I think the profile of a successful OSBI and SaaS BI user might look like:

BI USER PROFILE OSBI SAAS BI
BACKGROUND Highly skilled software developer. Years of professional experience Highly skilled, but not necessarily from IT TECHNOLOGY PREFERENCE Likely Linux/Java or LAMP stack developer Language and platform agnostic LEARNING PATTERN Quickly reads and absorbs vast quantities of information No time or bandwidth for steep learning curves PROBLEM SOLVING Significant hacking and debugging skills Tinkerer PERSONALITY Self-starter, fend-for-yourself mentality Self-starter but collaborative as needed PAIN TOLERANCE Highly persistent and courageous. Willing to take the pain Tenacious but low pain tolerance BI EXPERTISE Medium to expert None to medium PHILOSOPHY “Get it right” “Get it done” TECHNOLOGY VISION Technology lover Technology just a means to an end BI USE CASE Often spills into the 20 of 80/20 Usually stays within the 80 of 80/20 SUPPORT EXPECTATIONS Relies on OSS community support and Google Expects dedicated real-time vendor support BI-SPECIFIC WORKLOAD Works on BI full time BI just one of many hats worn

Based on this, it’s fairly easy to recognize one of GoodData’s most common user type. Mind you, it’s not the only user type able and willing to use GoodData, but it is one we see in many of our customers. Internally, we call this persona “Norbert”. Norbert wants to provide reporting, analytics and data services for his customers. His customers can be either internal (same organization) or external (a consulting assignment). Norbert often shares many goals and traits with software developers (I can attest to this having been one for twenty years) namely, pleasing his end users, enhancing his career (or business) through enriching experience, and controlling his environment. Pushing a little further, Norbert is really not so far from your typical SaaS vendor or data provider (ISV) either (and often works there).

As it turns out, these three basic goals – end-user focus, career enhancement and environment control – are essential to healthy, productive and successful BI development. Unfortunately, OSBI only typically meets one of the three because it clearly offers a rich technical experience leveraging numerous tools and techniques. As such, OSBI can indeed be a career-enhancer. But sometimes, end users become disappointed due to over-hyped expectations, unforeseen technical hurdles, and delays. And controlling one’s environment in an Open Source soup of technologies, platforms, tools and communities can be challenging at best.

So if you are a BI implementer on the fence between OSBI and SaaS, you must ask yourself this question: I am the cowboy, commando type, or more of a “get it done” practical Norbert? And if you’re a business executive looking for a long-term BI strategy, you must choose your path wisely. Because it takes different kinds of people and skill sets to succeed in each model. Who’s on your BI team?

In the end, the challenge isn’t about deciding which is “better”, Open Source or Cloud. Rather, it is about determining which approach fits your organizational (or developer) DNA better. There’s a lot of hype in both camps out there undoubtedly. But it takes a healthy doze of realistic self-analysis and good, informative insight to steer the right course. To that effect, the following links might be a good start. Happy sailing.

Open Source:
Open Source BI Adoption on the Rise
Goodman on BI
Who Is Using Open Source Business Intelligence, and Why
OSBI Forums

SaaS BI:
Has SaaS Killed Open Source?
BI SaaS Vendors Are Not Created Equal
Business Intelligence: PivotLink v SAP, a tale of two worlds
SaaS BI Continues to Draw Interest, Traction

Here is an overview video of GoodData filmed as a part of the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge – as you know, GoodData was selected as the winner. Enjoy!