Fitting a Square Peg in a Round Hole

Good news! For the first time GoodData has been included in Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. While we’re excited to be recognized as a fast-growing player in the market, with all due respect — and I mean that sincerely — Gartner got us wrong.

That’s because Gartner not only lumped us with old school of on-premise software vendors but it also used a scale built to measure the traditional BI value stack. While everybody else sells software or appliances, we sell business service.

We just don’t fit their model.

Let me explain: GoodData is the only true pure SaaS player that Gartner looked at. We deliver end-to-end data integration, data warehousing, data analysis and data dashboarding in the cloud to thousands of customers and tens of thousands of users. We give business people an intuitive, visual app that lets them make sense out of mountains of disparate data so they can quickly make the right business decisions.

With GoodData there’s no or little IT involvement. We deliver predictable total cost of ownership (TCO), zero risk, and — as with other SaaS products — align with customers’ business needs.

This is how we achieved three times higher BI penetration than the rest of industry — as Gartner noted in the report.  And it’s why we gained more than 8,000 amazing business customers as well as grew our revenue fivefold in the last year. Yes, we are actually delivering on the decades old vision of BI for masses!

Sounds great, right? Yet Gartner’s predominant audience has always been the IT organization. As such, they emphasize features such as ad hoc query, development tools, BI infrastructure, OLAP, Microsoft Office integration, collaboration, search-based data discovery, prescriptive modeling simulation and optimization, predictive modeling and data mining.

And while we more than meet our customers’ needs for these features, unlike Gartner our business users measure us on uptime, real-time data, usability, flexibility, time-to-value, relevant KPIs, data quality and data trust. In effect, our customers value simplicity over complexity. And that’s what we deliver: The best end-user experience.

We place higher value on broad user adoption than we do on exposing OLAP cubes and ETL runs to our users (and to the analysts). As a SaaS company we constantly bring new features and functionality to all our customers. In fact, we issue a release every week — delivering new capabilities that all our customers can use immediately without the fear of breaking their legacy systems. I believe that’s why Gartner’s description of GoodData is a snapshot in history that’s at least six months behind today’s reality.

Cloud computing is happening now. With it, any business user can explore external information on LinkedIn, customer records from Salesforce and internal data from their legacy systems. And that means they use GoodData to take control of their future, today.  At GoodData, we constantly strive to hide backend complexities that our users don’t care about, so that they can perform the analyses they do. That’s the new role of BI, and I’m eager to see that new reality reflected in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.