Customer analytics is clearly one of the GoodData sweetspots. We see a lot of customers and prospects doing pipeline analytics and trending with sales data both within and without Salesforce. However, I think it’s always interesting to step back and look at the full gamut of use cases periodically. Why? Because people in this field are amazingly resourceful. They always come up with new and original ways of using GoodData that make you think “wow, I would never have thought of that”. And also because the question “what is GoodData typically used for” comes up frequently.  While the answer “pretty much anything” is factually correct, I find real-life examples to be more compelling and entertaining. So let’s go through a couple (some company names are left out to protect the innocent).

A public policy researcher is using GoodData to track crime data and build statistics on various crime types by victim and geographic area, giving other researchers access to ‘slice and dice’ this data One early stage GoodData adopter, Gazelle, is in the green “re-commercing” industry (who knew there was such a thing?). You basically pitch them your used equipment (like a cellphone, for example), and they make you an offer to buy it. If accepted, you ship them the equipment, they send you a check, and recycle the item. It’s a win-win situation for both sides and great for the environment. It’s also a very complex marketplace to manage and measure. To do this, the company pushes all of it sales and inventory data to GoodData for frequent visualization and analysis serving both strategic (planning) and tactical (operational) executives in real time. An IT service consulting group specializing in law firm support with 20,000 seats is currently evaluating GoodData as a way to provide their clients with insight into their network and operation metrics. Periodically they collect KPI metrics and send updates to their clients as needed. Another company, Molo Rewards, is using GoodData to drive and track customer loyalty. Molo joins customers and retailers in one big marketplace and generates incentive rewards and coupons via wireless devices to drive loyalty. They accumulate significant volumes of data and need the ability to measure the effectiveness of their services and delivery in real time and also provide historical reporting and dashboards to the executive suite. One prospect provides a new type of advertising service for businesses. Instead of interrupting your internet, TV, or mobile experience with annoying ads or popups, it simply places a small unobtrusive “icon” on the screen that you can click (or select with a TV remote) for additional information. Then shortly thereafter, the advertiser sends you an email containing the product information you requested. Needless to say, this business model generates large amounts of consumer and contextual information, some of which is needed to measure performance, maintain SLAs, and keep track of usage and profitability levels. Not only that, but this data is also made available to the advertisers who can therefore track their own campaigns. A benefits management service company is using GoodData to store and analyze payroll and medical plan coverages and fees for their customers’ employees. Squidoo is a content delivery network (CDN) shop and is one of our Amazon CloudFront Analytics beta customers. The company has been using GoodData to determine which file types affect their delivery performance by hogging network bandwidth. It turns out the answer had to do with files containing javascript. And they quickly determined that several optimization techniques would reduce their size significantly and yield a 60% performance boost. A price shopping portal company in Europe focuses specifically on car tires. Every 24 hours, they collect and aggregate tire pricing information in their geographic area. So if you’re a dealership, retail or repair shop looking for the best regional prices, you log on to their site and check out the latest dashboards for your brand and area. They integrate GoodData into their portal solution to give their users a seamless analytics view into daily price feeds. Several consulting groups are building integrated OEM solutions for non-profit clients (like the American Cancer Institute) using GoodData. An outfit (and GoodData partner) called Edge Solutions built a Hyperion usage tracking application with GoodData. They feed Hyperion logs to GoodData periodically and automatically. Then they update a set of canned dashboards to deliver usage information to their end users. Business intelligence people are definitely resourceful and resilient. They have to be, having suffered decades of complicated, convoluted and expensive tools. But most of the time, all they want to do is load up some data, report on it, analyze it, and get on with their job. No drama, no complications. So the fact that these folks are finding so many innovative ways to quickly adopt GoodData and do just that is, in my book, a testament to this software’s power as a new-era “Get ‘er Done” business intelligence platform even Larry the Cable Guy could use.