In my last blog, I wrote about what I consider to be a bold and high return move by GoodData to lead a new segment that they call, “Insight as a Service” . Insight as A Service as GoodData describes it is a much better mousetrap than Business Intelligence in the Cloud. To lead a market, you need to define the context of the conversation, and GoodData is trying to do just that. I’ve known Roman Stanek the GoodData CEO for a number of years, so while writing the last blog, I sent him a few questions via email. The answers provide more insight into how and why GoodData is pursuing this strategy.
Ken: What led to need to change GoodData’s positioning to Insight as A Service ?
Roman: Our goal was to move the discussion away from technologies, especially vendor comparisons, so that we could talk about the real values thatwe are providing our customers. Talking to a CMO about becoming a leader in social analytics, or a technology CEO about building data products is a lot of fun.
Ken: How did you come up with the new positioning?
Roman: We looked at why we, and many of our current customers, were succeeding with GoodData. The common attributes became very obvious.The faster they went live with their first set of insights, the more frequently they renewed or grew their project. When we brought subject-matter experts into their projects, especially to talk about ecurity, or social media maturity, they succeeded even faster. About six months ago, we decided to build the collective intelligence we’d accumulated in all these projects into the product itself, so that our data discovery offering could actually teach or guide the user through recommendations we offer as they work in the product. We then said, “This is how we help our customers start at Insights…”
Ken: Why should customers care about Insight as a Service ?
Roman: We offer instant infrastructure, you can start tomorrow. We know nearly every data source they are likely to need, even when it changes. And we teach them how to perform good analysis both inside the Analytic Designer, and also through our experience. We give them a scalable yet agile platform that helps then succeed in their business very rapidly. In a world where nearly 80% of BI projects fail, mostly because the people, the data and the technology change too rapidly, we own two out of three of those problems, and then we coach the people.
Ken: Why wasn’t BI in the Cloud good enough description, or just BI as a Service?
Roman: It really didn’t characterize the value we bring. BI just sounds like tools and database drivers. We go far beyond BI.
Ken: Where do you see the messaging evolving to over time?
Roman: We see it becoming bigger and more encompassing. We think other vendors will copy it and help us build out this space in the market. But this collective intelligence we have amassed and keep growing is uniquely ours.
Ken: What’s the magical place you can take customers to who come with you on this journey?
Roman: Their magical place, is as the leader in their market. It’s already happening. Our customers benchmark their customers accentuating the best, and motivating the laggards. They build revenue generating data products. They know how to measure social data ROI. They do this because they have good data.