Fidelity Growth Partners Europe Leads New Round

GoodData today announced that it has closed Series A funding, adding $6.5 million in new capital, in addition to the $5 million raised in seed funding in 2009. This funding round was led by new investor Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and General Catalyst Partners, and includes participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Windcrest Partners.

GoodData provides an on-demand business intelligence service, delivering operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. Through partnerships with SaaS providers and an active developer network, GoodData powers over 100,000 reports and 5,000 dashboards each month, all on a true multi-tenant cloud-based BI platform as a service (PaaS).

“GoodData has the right recipe to disrupt the multi-billion dollar BI market,” said Simon Clark, Partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. “GoodData combines game-changing technology with an innovative go-to-market approach that’s too good to pass up.”

Key Company Highlights:

• November 2009: Introduced commercial SaaS applications for self-service dashboards and operational reporting across sales, marketing and customer support
• December 2009: Won 2009 Amazon Web Services startup challenge, beating over 1,000 companies building their business on the cloud using AWS
• June 2010: Opened up a complete BI Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), giving technical enablers open APIs and freely available developer tools to build their own BI apps
• July 2010: Launched GoodData for Zendesk, a powered by GoodData offering providing free dashboards and advanced analytics for all Zendesk Plus+ customers

“I founded GoodData to break the BI stranglehold,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “This new funding allows us to continue building out our BI PaaS, and to leverage the unfair economics of the cloud to further disrupt the BI market.”

About GoodData
GoodData is the first company to offer a complete business intelligence platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS), providing our customers and partners operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Fidelity Growth Partners Europe
Fidelity Growth Partners Europe is a venture and growth capital investor which backs entrepreneurial companies in the IT and clean technology sectors across Europe. FGPE supports portfolio companies as they accelerate their growth with funding, team building,  partnerships and access to its global network.  Building on Fidelity’s 40 year heritage of venture investing, the firm has established a significant presence in Europe and invested in many of the leading European technology companies including Curam, Qumas, Newbay, Seatwave, Neverfail and Asset Control.  In January 2010, FGPE raised a new £100 million fund dedicated to backing European technology companies.

About General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building the technology-based companies that will lead innovation and transform industries. Founded in 2000, General Catalyst Partners leverages its principals’ extensive operational, business development and technological expertise to provide portfolio companies with a catalyst for success through business-building and partnership development assistance. General Catalyst is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. For more information, please visit: http://www.generalcatalyst.com.

With today’s launch of GoodData for Zendesk, we are introducing a new way for SaaS providers (and their customers) to succeed with analytics. It’s called Powered by GoodData, and it’s free.

Free for the SaaS providers who no longer have to avert their eyes when their customers ask for better reporting. Free for the end customers who no longer have to struggle with Excel spreadmarts or doomed-for-failure IT projects just to report on their own data.

Why are we doing this?

1. Because business data should be in the hands of business people. We are sick of the BI industry talking about “BI for the masses” yet delivering BI for IT only.
2. Because we can. GoodData was built to leverage the unfair economics of the cloud and multi-tenancy. We can automate the setup of hundreds of GoodData projects when we know the data, the model, the reports and dashboards. And hosting is essentially free thanks to Amazon Web Services. No cloudwashing here.
3. Because we believe in return before investment. You could spend the next 6 months evaluating the BI vendors that claim fast, easy, affordable, flexible, on-demand, cloud-based, adaptive, predictive analytics on all your data or your customers data. We think the BI world is stuck in paralysis by analysis mode – 65% failure rates; 18 month project cycles, fascination with the new, new thing. Ugh. Stop your evaluation cycles and your requirements gathering and start looking at your data. Change how you buy BI.
4. Because we know success breeds success. SaaS vendors ask us how we make money on Powered by GoodData. We’ve all read the skepticism about freemium. For us it’s simple. As soon as people see their data in GoodData, they invariably want to analyze more data from more sources, which is where we make money. Or to put it another way: we make money only when your customers succeed with GoodData. We do believe in BI for masses.
5. Because we want to meet your customers. Our value proposition to you is simple, let us delight your customers with meaningful and actionable dashboards, and give them the power to slice and dice the data how they want. We can take analytics off of your product roadmap, let you deliver in in less than 60 days, without major engineering investment, and we can even show you a way to make money up-selling advanced analytics. All that we ask in return is the permission to market and sell to your customers.

At the end of the day, Powered by GoodData is all about eliminating the friction between business users and business data. Today that friction can be easily measured in time, money, and frustration. We, as vendors, owe our customers these types of “ah-ha” experiences that remind them that the cloud is more than just moving the same failed approaches to another deployment model.

If you are a SaaS provider and host customer data, ufmm!nf!bcpvu!gsff!bobmzujdt!gps!nz!dvtupnfst')">we’d like to talk.

Did I mention that it’s free?

Free dashboards and advanced analytics measure support performance

San Francisco, CA — Zendesk, a web-based customer support software provider, announced an integration with GoodData, an on-demand reporting and analytics provider, that delivers powerful dashboards and advanced analytics to Zendesk customers.

GoodData for Zendesk enables companies to gain business insight into their customer support activity, improve key support metrics such as customer satisfaction, agent performance, and ticket resolution, and easily analyze the results.

“GoodData for Zendesk gives us a customized view into our Zendesk activity without having to struggle with complex reporting or analytics products,” said Rob Holmes of New Zealand Post. “With just a few mouse clicks, we can see details of our support activity by type or resolution time, and even see how our backlog changes over time.”

GoodData for Zendesk allows customers to:

• View dashboards and reports that are automatically updated daily with the latest Zendesk ticket data
• Access pre-built dashboards on support ticket creation and resolution, agent performance, and top trends
• “Slice and dice” data with all standard and custom ticket fields
• Collaborate and share custom projects, reports and results with colleagues and management via email, PDF, CSV, or embedded into websites

“At GoodData, we’re on a mission to take the BS out of BI, and delivering dashboards directly to Zendesk customers is a great start,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “Now Zendesk customers can measure the health of their support channels without going through Excel or BI hell.”

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so all businesses want to be able to apply metrics to their customer support efforts, but until now business intelligence has been synonymous with painful, expensive software implementations,” said Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk. “Fortunately, those days are over. Now our customers can add advanced analytics with one click. It couldn’t be easier.”

The GoodData business intelligence offering is available today for Zendesk Plus+ customers only at no additional charge.

For more information, visit www.zendesk.com/gooddata.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first company to offer a complete business intelligence platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS), providing our customers and partners operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Zendesk
Zendesk is a leading provider of web-based customer support software that is reinventing how companies engage with their customers. The company serves more than 5,000 businesses large and small, including Twitter, MSNBC, Lonely Planet and SAP. Zendesk products are easy to customize, integrate, and use so companies can quickly start offering better customer service. Founded in 2007, Zendesk is funded by Charles River Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.

We are continuing our series of five tips for creating compelling dashboards today. Last time we wrote about Keeping Things Simple. This time we are highlighting the importance of setting clear goals.

2. Measure Performance Against Clear Goals

In the previous examples, we saw sample dashboards dealing with sales performance. However, even in the “good” example, there is still something missing: By looking at the dashboard, a viewer has no way of knowing if the performance is good, bad, or middling. The data does not instill a sense of urgency or, alternatively, praise.

Look at how this small change can add a wealth of meaning to the dashboard:

With the company sales target added to the line graph on the left, viewers have a whole new understanding of the numbers. It is clear that the company has only been above target for two of the seven months charted. This insight drastically changes the way a consumer interprets and scrutinizes the rest of the dashboard.

The addition of clear targets or goals serves multiple functions. First, as we see, it provides a key to interpreting the rest of the data. All consumers of the data are on the same page in regards to whether performance is good or bad, and there is no ambiguity. Secondly, this evaluation against company targets provokes viewers to consider actions that could lead to better performance. The target is ingrained into the minds of the users, particularly if they had a hand in target creation in the first place. This is a key step in creating a metrics-driven business.

Tips for setting company targets:

• Make sure people are aware of the metrics that judge their performance.
• Set targets that are challenging but attainable.
• Get buy-in from colleagues before setting targets.
• Keep current results public so people always understand the current situation with respect to the targets.

Here is a video and slides we presented today during our webinar introducing GoodData BI Platform as a Service.

Feel free to sign up for a GoodData free trial or visit our Developer Network.

GoodData: BI PaaS Overview

View more presentations from GoodData.

Our great support expert, Ray Light, wrote the 5 tips after helping our users with hundreds of reports and dashboards. Thanks Ray!

The trend toward deeper and deeper analytics to measure business performance has resulted in a slew of tools for creating dashboards. Many of these tools are quite sophisticated and have the ability to produce stunning visuals relatively quickly. While these tools have empowered some, we have also seen examples that would be improved if they hadn’t existed in the first place.

This short guide aims to present simple tips to help anyone create compelling dashboards. Compelling dashboards do more than just look nice/hi-tech/artistic/etc. We try to present “compelling” as dashboards that convey meaning, increase understanding, provoke thought and spur action. Here is the tip #1:

1. Know What You Want to Say

This simple idea seems like a no-brainer, but it’s not hard to find examples of dashboards containing mixed messages. These types of dashboards convey weak or no meaning. If the interpretation lies in the eye of the beholder, the dashboard has failed.

Consider the following example:

Here we see a dashboard titled Sales History. In the line graph on the left, we see sales by product vertical, while on the right, we see a list of the top five sales reps. These divergent reports, while sales related, provide little actionable information to the viewer. Working backwards, it’s difficult to determine what the dashboard creator is trying to say here.

In this second example, we see the beginnings of a much more interesting story.

The line chart on the left shows a simplified gross sales figure, while the bar chart on the right breaks down those sales numbers into different opportunity size tiers. Here the data are related, and showing different levels of granularity, from a summary on the left, to more detailed information on the right.

Notice that Sales Rep report was removed from this dashboard completely. That’s not to say that this information isn’t important; just that this information is likely better placed in a separate dashboard dealing explicitly with rep performance.

The following questions help test your dashboard for compliance with Tip #1:

• What am I trying to say?
• Does each element on the dashboard reinforce my overall message?
• Is each piece relevant?
• Will the consumer be able to draw the appropriate conclusions?

Do you keep your dashboards simple? Do you have some other tips? Let us know!

One week into the release of our BI platform-as-a-service, a few of our Early Access Customers are starting to do amazing things. What’s stunning is the diversity of usage that we are already seeing. Here are a few highlights.

• A hot new SaaS provider wants to provide marketing analytics to help 100s of their customers justify the spend on their service. They don’t have the internal expertise or time to roll their own BI. They looked at some open source tools, but it was way too much work to get to basic reports and dashboards for their customers. GoodData BI PaaS lets them create custom dashboards for their customers – all with a shared data model – and automate the process to boot.
• A BI consulting company wants to get out of the BI plumbing business. They spend way too much time today procuring and provisioning infrastructure as opposed to providing higher-value consulting services. Accessing GoodData together with their ETL tool of choice turns out to be the key to getting them productive in Cloud BI.
• An existing GoodData customer wants to automate the regular loading of data from a few internal databases into GoodData, and be able to change metrics, add data sources, and link data together without hitting the dreaded BI project reset button. They’re pretty confident BI PaaS is going to save them tons of time on prepping and loading data for their dashboards.

What do you want to do with BI PaaS? Join us for a live demo on July 13 and learn if it’s a good fit for you.

Next Tuesday, July 13th at 10am PDT, we will be presenting a webinar on the GoodData Business Intelligence Platform as a Service (BI PaaS) that officially launched this past month. Effective immediately, our cloud BI platform is available as a set of REST-based APIs and connectors, published on GoodData’s Developer Network.

Join us for a short overview of GoodData’s BI PaaS, and a detailed live demo of our developer tools in action. We will walk through:

• GoodData CL – a command line utility that wraps our APIs for easy access

• GoodData Snap – GoodData’s free connector for SnapLogic, which makes it seamless to use SnapLogic for ETL into a GoodData project

Title: GoodData: BI Platform as a Service
Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

Developer Community Launches with Early Access Program

GoodData launches the industry’s first Business Intelligence Platform as a Service (BI PaaS), opening GoodData’s cloud business intelligence platform to any data, any model, any source. Effective immediately, GoodData’s cloud BI platform is available as a set of REST-based APIs and connectors, published on GoodData’s Developer Network and supported under an early access program.

According to Gartner Group, 40% of BI budgets will be held by business units by 2012. GoodData is meeting this shift in BI adoption through GoodData on Demand and GoodData for Salesforce CRM, SaaS applications that make it easy for companies to deploy operational dashboards in a fraction of the time and cost of other approaches. With today’s announcement, GoodData extends these benefits beyond initial usage by making it easy to incorporate more data from more sources.

“Openness and flexibility are central to the founding vision of GoodData,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “GoodData delivers self-service dashboarding and analytics for business users; now with our BI PaaS, we can deliver self-service for technical enablers as well.”

Central to GoodData’s BI PaaS is an open integration framework – a set of APIs and tools that make it easy to manage GoodData data marts and users; model and load data, and share reports, dashboards and analytics – all programmatically using open APIs. Highlights of GoodData’s new BI Platform-as-a-Service include:

• Fluid Data Model: GoodData’s new fluid data modeling framework makes it simple to adapt the underlying data model that powers every GoodData project. Now it’s possible to add new data sources or modify existing data or connections without re-building reports or dashboards.
• Open APIs: GoodData now has published REST-based APIs for data modeling and loading, to complement existing APIs for project and account management and report execution.
• Pre-Built Connectors: GoodData has published pre-built connectors with Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, flat files and relational databases, all available free of charge.
• Developer Community: The new GoodData Developer Network now includes full API documentation, tutorials, pre-built connector code and a command-line tool for developers to build custom data integrations, all hosted on GitHub.
• SnapLogic Integration: GoodData provides a free connector, or “Snap”, in the SnapStore giving GoodData users instant access to every system supported by SnapLogic, integrating data from SaaS applications, social media, and internal databases and applications. A free 30-day trial of SnapLogic pre-integrated with GoodData is available at http://store.snaplogic.com/products/good-data

Supporting Quotes

“Setting up operational reporting for our company in GoodData has been great. Their new data integration framework will increase the power of GoodData in our company tenfold by making it easy for me to add more data and adjust our data model.”
-Andrew Bartels, IT Director at PSA Financial.

“Business Intelligence is one of most requested uses of cloud integration from our customers. Packaging GoodData and SnapLogic together lets customers start analyzing any of their business data in minutes. Now dashboards and reporting is a breeze for any of the dozens of systems that are connected via the SnapStore.”
-Gaurav Dhillon, SnapLogic Chairman and CEO.

“GoodData refreshingly recognises that you may want to go beyond the data integration you get out-of-the-box on subscription and have gone the extra mile to provide pre-built integration with cloud based data integration tools.”
-Mike Ferguson, Managing Director of Intelligent Business Strategies

Live Webinar
Join GoodData for a live webinar on July 13 at 10am PDT for an in-depth tour of GoodData Platform as a Service, or register today to be a part of the early access program.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first company to offer a complete business intelligence platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS), providing our customers and partners operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

Jaroslav Gergic, GoodData’s vp of engineering, presented at last week’s Burton Group Catalyst Conference.

Below is a copy of his presentation, which covers the architectural considerations when rolling out a BI service that must scale to tens of thousands of users, projects, reports, dashboards. Bottom line = if it’s not multi-tenant and purpose-built for large volume BI, it’s probably not going to work…

GoodData – Towards a cloud-based BI Platform as a Service

View more presentations from Jaroslav Gergic.

It’s already halfway through 2010, cloud computing is making its way predictably through the hype cycle, IT folks are thinking twice about buying UNIX servers, keeping old client/server applications alive, hosting their own email, building internal apps, etc.

Yet in the BI corner of the IT department, there is still a group of hobbyists who insist on building and maintaining their own internal infrastructure. High on their shopping list are databases, OLAP, ETL, analytics, cleansing, metadata, modeling frameworks, dashboard building tools, and lots and lots of hardware and time to assemble it all together. Just like the old days.

We ask these people to consider a different alternative. What if instead of focusing on building and operating your BI infrastructure you could focus on what your business people want – access to the data that drives their business, fast enough to change their business. Your business applications brethren made the switch. Even your Exchange admins are doing it.

Here’s a nice little graphic that speaks to how your world shifts if you stop being a BI hobbyist.

So really, why don’t you stop?

GoodData announced that HA Advantage, a provider of a web-based transportation management system that optimizes shipping operations for small and medium–sized businesses, has implemented GoodData for Salesforce. GoodData for Salesforce allows HA Advantage to analyze its historical sales pipeline and to understand performance at each discrete stage of the sales cycle. HA Advantage will be also extending its implementation of GoodData to monitor its Sales, Marketing and Operations Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

According to Carter Perez, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at HA Advantage, implementing GoodData is a big step forward: “With GoodData we gained an unprecedented insight into our sales process. We can now look at the trend of our sales pipeline, analyze each opportunity and related activities and learn from what we did well and what went wrong. We can then identify patterns of activities that helped us to successfully close deals and replicate them.”

HA Advantage was previously exporting data from Salesforce CRM and manipulating it in Excel. “That was a very slow and error-prone process and we still couldn’t get what we wanted, because there are some data that simply can’t be exported from Salesforce.”

The initial implementation of GoodData for Salesforce was completed in a few weeks from project conception to full user adoption – a timeframe typical for most GoodData implementations.

HA Advantage will be extending their current GoodData implementation to monitor and report against their company KPIs. GoodData for Salesforce can easily be combined with the rest of HA Advantage’s disparate data sources, such as Act-On online marketing software and Operations data, allowing insight across the organization – the resulting reports and dashboards will be shared across the organization helping HA Advantage to become a fully metrics driven organization.

About GoodData
GoodData (www.gooddata.com) 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 HA Advantage

HA Advantage (http://www.haadvantage.com) helps executives and businesses control, reduce, and manage transportation costs. With a hybrid in-sourcing logistics approach purpose built for small to mid-size shippers, HA Advantage uses an exclusive shipping tariff, freight billing process and free transportation management system to reduce transportation costs and improve control and visibility into shipping operations.

Cloud-Based, Software-as-a-Service Business Intelligence Solution Enables Organizations to Gain Greater Visibility Into Key Metrics Driving Their Business

Wellesley, Mass. – June 14, 2010 – THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that GoodData has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

GoodData helps companies track the metrics that drive their business by making it easy to collect, report on and share data across marketing, sales, support and operations. The company does this through a Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) Platform that delivers business dashboards in weeks instead of months.

An example of the business benefits of GoodData’s solution isTriNet, a Human Resources Management services provider. TriNet uses GoodData for Salesforce for sales and marketing analytics in conjunction with Salesforce CRM. Delivering role-based operational dashboards to TriNet executives and regional sales management – powered by GoodData – increased visibility into the sales pipeline across the company, and enabled TriNet to achieve a 62% increase in average deal size for Q1 2010 over Q3 2009. TriNet has also been able to double the number of high-potential deals in its sales pipeline, while cutting in half the number of low caliber deals that were wasting valuable sales time.


It is for these reasons that GoodData has been named a Best of SaaS Showplace Award winner. A summary of the company’s winning BoSS Award submission can be found at http://www.saas-showplace.com/awardSummary.php?key=1769.

“We are pleased to be recognized by THINKstrategies and the SaaS Showplace for the business value of our cloud-based SaaS BI solution,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “We started the company to help bring metrics front-and-center into any business, and we hope that our customer successes speak for themselves.”

“In today’s challenging business environment, it is essential to properly target an organization’s sales and marketing efforts to produce positive results,” stated Jeffrey M. Kaplan, the founder of the SaaS Showplace and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the strategic consulting firm which conceived and administers the Showplace.“GoodData offers a cost-effective BI solution which helps organizations generate valuable analytics so they can improve their performance.” A list of previous winners of the BoSS Awards can be found at http://www.saas-showplace.com/registerforbossaward.html.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. For more information regarding the CCBV Awards, go to http://www.thinkstrategies.com/cloudcomputingawards.html.

# # # About the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards The BoSS Award program is an ongoing initiative to identify and promote SaaS, and ‘cloud computing’, companies which are offering on-demand solutions which are generating measurable business benefits for their customers.BoSS awards nominations are accepted on an ongoing basis, and more than one winner can be awarded in each SaaS ShowplaceApplication, Industry and Enabling Technology Supplier category.For more information or to nominate a BoSS award winner, go to http://www.saas-showplace.com/registerforbossaward.html. # # # About the SaaS Showplace Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Showplace® is a service of THINKstrategies, Inc. This Showplace was established in 2006 to provide the following benefits,

• Give enterprise decision-makers a quick directory of the leading SaaS providers and a convenient source of valuable insight regarding SaaS trends.
• Give SaaS providers a targeted tool to increase their visibility among enterprise decision-makers, and gain access to key enabling technology suppliers.
• Give enabling technology suppliers a specialized platform to increase industry awareness regarding their SaaS solutions.

The SaaS Showplace is now the largest and highest ranked, vendor-independent, online directory and resource center of industry best practices in the SaaS market. For more information, go to www.saas-showplace.com. # # # About THINKstrategies, Inc. THINKstrategies, Inc. is the only strategic consulting services company formed specifically to address the unprecedented business challenges facing IT managers, solutions providers and investors today as the technology industry shifts toward a services orientation.THINKstrategies’ mission is to help our clients re-THINK their corporate strategies, and refocus their limited resources to achieve their business objectives. THINKstrategies helps enterprise decision-makers with their sourcing strategies, IT solutions providers with their marketing strategies, and VCs with their investment strategies.In addition to the Software-as-a-Service Showplace, THINKstrategies is also the founder of the Managed Services Showplace, a vendor-independent, online directory and information resource center of managed service solutions.For more information regarding THINKstrategies’ unique consulting services, visit www.thinkstrategies.com, or contact us atinfo [at] thinkstrategies [dot] com. # # # 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, GoodData 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.

You can measure almost anything...

“Ok, I get it. I need to measure stuff, but what stuff?” this is a question I receive almost every day. Getting inspired by Stephen Few’s book Information Dashboard Design, I put together a list of typical business metrics you can measure. It is up to you to figure out what the most important indicators for your specific business are, but I am hoping to spark up some ideas here. Pick just few of the indicators for the start, start measuring them on a regular basis and share them across your organization, you can always add more later.

What do you measure? What did I miss? Let me know!

Sales
Bookings
Billings
Number of orders
Selling prices
Sales qualified leads

Marketing
Marketing funnel: Inquires -> Marketing qualified leads -> Sales qualified leads -> Opportunity Pipeline
Campaign success
Customer demographics
% Revenue sourced by marketing
% Revenue influenced by marketing
Outbound emails sent
Referrals
Social media mentions

Finance
Revenues
Expenses
Profits
Operating margin
Cash Flow

Technical Support
Number of support calls
Resolved Cases
Customer satisfaction
Call durations
Average waiting time

Fulfillment
Number of days to ship
Backlog
Inventory levels
Return rates

Manufacturing
Number of units manufactured
Manufacturing times
Number of defects

Human resources
Employee satisfaction
Employee turnover
Count of open positions
Count of late performance reviews

Information Technology
Network downtime
System Usage
Fixed application bugs

Web Services
Number of visitors
Click through rate
Conversion rate (e.g. number of product registrations)
Number of Pageviews
Average time per visit
Bounce rate

Product (online)
Product usage
Time since last login
Account Cancellations

Photo credit flowerchild60

Learn how to take the first steps towards effectively tracking your Marketing Funnel. From basic top of the funnel stats like measuring your web traffic and awareness, down to MQL’s and SQL’s.

Today’s digital marketing landscape presents companies with a variety of innovative channels to engage with potential customers. Each medium provides its own reporting/analytics, allowing users to track and test the performance of these efforts.

Most marketers are swimming in data – from web analytics, email marketing, marketing automation and lead nurturing,  to social media, and plain old offline efforts like trade shows. How do you make sure you don’t sink in data from different sources? It’s often difficult to determine how or where to start analyzing your company’s marketing effectiveness as a whole.

Join Sam Boonin, GoodData, VP of Marketing as he discusses how to take the first steps towards effectively tracking your Marketing Funnel.

Attend this webcast to learn:

• Where and how to start tracking your marketing waterfall
• Easy ways to find the most crucial data to track at each level
• How data at different levels of the funnel relates to one another
• How we’re tracking our Marketing Funnel at GoodData

Title: Track Your Marketing Waterfall
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

Register and attend this webcast and you’ll receive our complimentary white paper, 5 Tips for Creating Compelling Dashboards

Most underutilized? No, it is not your machinery.

This weekend I was procrastinating writing a new blog post and was reading John Jantsch’s book The Referral Engine instead. Little I knew how interesting the book would turn out to be with respect to what the core of our business here at GoodData is – metrics driven businesses.

John Jantsch mentions Open book management – a management approach where all employees in an organization have visibility into what is going on inside their organization, the same way as if it was their own business. I thought this might be a little too extreme approach, but John Jantsch continued:

“Open book management doesn’t necessarily mean that every employee will have access to full financial picture. The real power is to give employees the key measure of business success and teach them to understand those measures and to use them to improve their performance. It is about fully engaging employees by helping them understand how their specific function plays a role in the overall success of the organization. It is about making business a game and teaching everyone the rules – how to keep score and how to win.”

Measuring business activities and making decisions based on hard metrics is a critical task for any business that wants to be successful in the long term. Yet, many top managers don’t have good visibility into what is going on inside their organizations and the lower in an organization chart one looks the worse the situation is. There are thousands highly talented middle managers who are frustrated by lack of data they have available for their business decision making. As Bo Burlighame writes in the book The Great Game of Business:

“it is the intelligence of the people working at a company that is the most underutilized resource available”.

We live at a time when everyone in an organization can have access to key business metrics and make smart decisions. We are surrounded by intelligent colleagues and there are tools out there that can leverage their experience and give us unprecedented visibility into our businesses, yet few of us are aware of the tools and even fewer of us use them. Let’s change it. Let’s get the tools and start with identifying three key performance indicators and making sure everyone on our teams can track them regularly. We can now do it in a week.

P.S.: What about you? Do you have visibility into your business? Do you have a dashboard with clear indicators that you can react to?

Photo Credit besar bears

I am happy to share with you two new videos on how GoodData is helping our recent customer Market Metrix delight their clients with better analytics and why Market Metrix chose GoodData to power their SaaS analytics over other vendors. Market Metrix is a leader in feedback solutions for the hospitality industry with a customer base of more than 100 enterprises across lodging, car rental, airlines and allied fields.

Prior to partnering with GoodData, Market Metrix offered their customers a set of standard reports, but users were asking for more and more custom reports. You can imagine that customizing reports for more than 100 companies was becoming a pretty complex endeavor. GoodData allowed Market Metrix to get out of the custom-report-building business, focus on their core activities and at the same time make their customers happier by providing a simple and flexible reporting mechanism.

What is exciting for us about partnering with Market Metrix is that they are a different type of customer than Enterasys Networks or Gazelle which we introduced you to in our previous videos. They are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) serving a lot of companies and GoodData will thus make life easier for many, many more people.

That is enough from me, hear now from Robert Honeycutt, Market Metrix’s CEO, and his team in the first video and from Keith Jaeger, VP of Product Development in the second.

P.S.: How do you like the videos? Any questions? Please comment below and let me know!

GoodData is holding a webinar next week with Forrester Research and DestinationCRM on the ABCs of Marketing  Analytics. We asked a simple question on the webinar sign-up form, and the answer is clear – marketers want to see more of their web analytics and their CRM data.

Look at the first 300 registrants – the question was Where is your most important source of marketing data that you want to gain visibility into?

Join us on the webinar and find out more….

Today, more than ever, marketers can harness the types of customer data that used to be available only to the most sophisticated consumer marketers. Website traffic & awareness, online marketing programs, traditional lead generation, customer satisfaction, even product usage data are suddenly at the fingertips of many marketers.

Identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should track is the best place to start. Otherwise, you’ll bury yourself in a slew of meaningless data. Here are five great places to start:

1. Basic Web Traffic and Conversion
Website visits has turned into the de-facto metric for measuring brand awareness and brand reach. The truth is that more than 50% of marketers don’t look at their own website stats – once you go out of the marketing department, the number is closer to zero. Don’t hide these in Omniture or Google Analytics, bring them into your marketing dashboard and share with the rest of the company. Website conversion is often the first sign of customer engagement. Report on conversion rates, and make sure to keep the conversion metric simple.

2. Lead and Campaign Activity
For B2B marketers, this is the first question everyone asks – how many leads are you adding to the top of the funnel each month. Track your leads and campaigns each month, and visually represent how the total number of new leads, and the breakdown by type, is changing over time. There’s plenty of room for detail once people want to drill into campaigns, but don’t neglect the top-level information.

3. The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is the lifeblood of any B2B marketer. These KPIs often define successful versus unsuccessful marketing efforts. Sometimes the names are different, but the funnel is pretty standard –  Inquiries (raw leads); MQL (marketing qualified leads); SQL (sales qualified leads); Leads Qualified to Opportunity Pipeline. Make sure you report on your marketing funnel on a regular basis – think of it as your KPI for throughput

4. Marketing Contribution to Revenue
Every marketer wants to know what impact their marketing efforts have had on the company’s revenue. The two KPIs that can be tracked here are % of revenue sourced by marketing and % of revenue influenced by marketing. Here you see how those metrics trend over six quarters. These KPIs measure program effectiveness.

5. Product Usage
Customer usage data is rapidly becoming the most critical data source for marketers – especially for companies offering their products or services over the Web. For the first time, marketers can track actual customer usage behavior – without surveys, focus groups, or help desk calls. It’s exactly the data that marketers have been clamoring for, and today it’s more available than ever. It’s easier than you think to start. Find 1-2  KPIs that you can track, and start to ask questions.