GoodData: A Leader in Delivering Business Insights Through Embedded Analytics

GoodData powers the transformation of decision-making for frontline workers within their daily business processes. The GoodData Enterprise Insights Platform is the only cloud-based, end-to-end platform for the creation, distribution, and management of analytics at massive scale. GoodData allows end-user companies to gather data and user decisions and transforms them into actionable insights delivered at the point of work. This empowers enterprises and software companies to integrate insights into applications so that their customers, partners, and employees can make more intelligent decisions, faster. The platform is powered by a highly scalable, elastic, and secure cloud analytics architecture with capabilities that support the entire data pipeline from data ingestion to insights delivery. GoodData works with customers to drive a business outcome focus allowing data to finally drive meaningful change for the business with the expertise of in-house data scientists, domain experts, and data engineers.

Mission to Leverage Decisions from Data

GoodData was founded in 2007 with headquarters in San Francisco and Portland. The company's mission is to fundamentally change the way businesses use data to make decisions. Many companies have not seen a return on their BI investment, and GoodData believes it is because the insights were not actionable, were not delivered in context or within the workflow. It has asked everyday business users to go out on their own and look at dashboards with no understanding of what to do with the information found on those dashboards. There was good intent behind self-service analytics, but in reality, it was not happening. People were not going to leave their daily workflow to look at a dashboard when that dashboard does not tell them what action to take. The company's foundation has always been to embedding insights at the point of work and delivering at mass scale.

A Passionate Entrepreneur and Insightful Leader

As the Founder and CEO of GoodData, Roman Stanek is a passionate entrepreneur and industry thought leader with over 20 years of high-tech experience. His latest venture, GoodData, was founded in 2007 with the mission to disrupt the business intelligence space and monetize big data. Prior to GoodData, Roman was the Founder and CEO of NetBeans, a leading Java development environment (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999) and Systinet, a leading SOA governance platform (acquired by Mercury Interactive, later Hewlett Packard, in 2006).

Disruptive Contribution to the Big Data Industry

As businesses have not received the ROI on their BI deployments as expected, GoodData is the leader in educating the public about embedded analytics. Many people don't understand that embedded analytics is a different animal. GoodData is embedded into the business process and is contextual. The company is not selling technology to IT, instead is selling analytics applications to a business unit for a business problem. GoodData aims to solve domain analytics problems. By being embedded at the point of work, without having to leave the application in which clients are used to working, and because the company is contextual, clients know exactly what to do with the insights that are being presented to them.

As a leader in the market, GoodData uses its expertise to help businesses define their business processes that they want to improve and then provides the platform to allow that to happen. GoodData has enhanced its platform to include machine-learning capabilities. By partnering with a cloud platform, its customers are able to take advantage of the latest technologies as they move up the analytics maturity curve.

Innovation and Partnerships Drive Success

Artificial Intelligence and IoT are at the center of today's innovation. All innovation includes one or both of these technologies and they will continue to grow in importance in the coming years. These technologies will define the competitiveness and success of a business.

GoodData promotes a culture of innovation. The company is continuously investing in the technologies that are disrupting the market and will separate successful businesses from those that are not. As mentioned, Artificial Intelligence and IoT are the cornerstones of today's innovation and GoodData is fully invested.

Awards and Accolades for Excellence

Most recently, GoodData has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™, Enterprise BI Platforms with Majority Cloud Deployments, Q3 2017 as well as a Strong Performer in the new Forrester Wave™, Insights Platform-As-A-Service, Q3 2017. Good Data is used by over 50% of the Fortune 500 companies and there are over 1.2 million users on the GoodData platform. And, over 70,000 businesses use GoodData.

Challenges and Impediments to Growth

According to Roman, the biggest challenge in the company's mind is that the industry has been focused on self-service dashboards while the company was focused on embedding insights at the point of work. GoodData was going against the popular trend because it knew that people would not leave their work environment to search for a static dashboard to look at visualizations that were difficult to interpret. It has taken some time for businesses and analysts to catch up to understanding that the only way to get ROI is to provide the insights with context and help guide everyday users in the actions they should take upon being presented with the data.

The Future Ahead

The industry is recognizing the value of embedding analytics at the point of work within the user's workflow, presenting considerable growth opportunities for GoodData in the years ahead. More companies will move away from self-service dashboards to embedding analytics at the point of work. They will also begin implementing machine learning for easily repeatable business processes, allowing frontline workers to spend more time on strategic business decisions.