“GoodData is 100% committed to getting maximum business value for every single customer,” said Cate. “The GoodData platform is absolutely transformative: we love helping customers access and interact with critical data previously out of reach. I am thrilled for the chance to work with all of our customers to drive incredible adoption and satisfaction.”

GoodData’s  Customer Success teams are located throughout the world and ensure all customers experience rapid time-to-value with the cloud-based Business Intelligence solution. Companies like Time Warner Cable, LivingSocial, Pandora, Enterasys and Gazelle, rely on GoodData to understand performance against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and make critical operational decisions every day.

“Customers are the center of the GoodData universe, and we want them to wring every ounce of business value out of our platform,” explained Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “Phenomenal growth in our customer base demands best-in-class support, implementation and training. Cliff will scale our services organization and maintain an unwavering focus on the customer.”

Prior to joining GoodData, Cate served as Vice President of Customer Success at CaseCentral, where he was responsible for the company’s overall leadership, strategy and execution of the Services organization. Before CaseCentral, Cliff held senior-level Services roles at Oracle, Stellent and Viant.

About GoodData

GoodData is a disruptive, cloud-based enterprise platform for business intelligence. The GoodData technology is intuitive, secure and fast. It helps convert big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives. GoodData is trusted by companies like Enterasys, Capgemini, and Software AG, and embedded into offerings from cloud innovators like Zendesk, Get Satisfaction and Pardot. Headquartered in San Francisco, GoodData is privately held and backed by leading venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners.

At GoodData, we like to tell stories. But instead of using books, we use dashboards. And instead of using words, we use numbers.

Whether you’re informing your team about the progress of a recent marketing campaign or sharing a year-end sales report at a staff meeting, your business has countless stories to tell. However, these aren’t stories made up of flowery, entertaining language—they are comprised of facts and figures unfolding tales of growth, progress and performance.

In business, stories need to be informative and supported with plenty of details—or data. They should be told with charts, reports, statistics and quantitative information to solidify claims, send a memorable message and provide actionable insight.

With the right visuals, numbers can simplify complex information into something manageable and understandable. Instead of relying on text-heavy descriptions, numbers allow businesses to summarize information into concise stories that can be accessed and shared without the trouble of sorting through useless information.

Dashboards make it easy to tell your story by summarizing your company’s activity into numbers and bringing it to life on your screen. Using interactive tables, charts and graphs, words are replaced with metrics to help you create meaningful messages in just a few characters. With a click of the mouse, the story of your business’ sales performance can be summarized into a simple percentage or line graph.

Don’t let the story of your business turn into a novel. Instead, focus on creating at-a-glance summaries using numbers to create a solid snapshot, jam-packed with relevant, engaging, and maybe even awe-inspiring content.

What numbers best tell your story?

One of her favorite GoodData features is the ability to snapshot. Data is interesting and becomes extra valuable when analyzed from a trending perspective. The gauge report, on the right, reveals the actual quarterly opportunities against a quota and shows only a "point in time" view into the revenue. The missing piece to the gauge report is the ability to measure revenue at any point in time and analyze overtime.

The line charts on the left reveals closed business versus the quarterly goal, with the blue line indicating the total revenue closed by week.  By capturing a full snapshot each week, it is possible to identify trends in the overall movement of the data. The following two line charts go well beyond the "point in time " view of the sales pipelines and reveal changes in pipeline over the quarter. 

This snapshot report answers the question, “When did we close the most revenue?”  Weeks four and eleven presented the biggest jumps in closed revenue. 

The final report is set with a defined drill-in. In this case, clicking on the W6 revenue will create a new chart, breaking down the specific point by sales reps. The new chart answers, “Which sales reps have closed the most revenue this quarter?”

What will snapshots tell you about your data?

“GoodData customers are at the forefront of a business revolution,” explained Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “Instead of getting buried by data, our customers harness data to drive great performance. GoodData delivers the information businesses have been searching for—quickly and without an army of analysts.”

In addition to breakneck customer and revenue growth, the company attracted $15 million in new venture financing to fuel its expansion. Andreessen Horowitz led the company’s most recent round along with existing investors: General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. The company added two key new members to its board: John O’Farrell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz; and Dave Girouard; vice president, apps and president, enterprise at Google. Capital raised now totals $28.5 million.

“2011 was a hockey stick year for GoodData user adoption and revenue growth,” said Stephane Panier, chief financial officer of GoodData. “We experienced an unprecedented ten-fold increase in Powered by GoodData partnerships, a four-fold increase in the number of direct customers, and strong renewals and upgrades from existing customers.”

To keep pace with explosive customer demand and support global customers, GoodData opened offices around the world. In addition to the company’s worldwide headquarters in San Francisco, new locations include: New York, Boston, Portland (Oregon), and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).

GoodData 2011 Momentum Highlights

Game-Changing User Adoption:

• GoodData users created over 13 million business-critical reports in GoodData.
• Number of active business users grew by over 800% year-over-year.
• GoodData is the source of truth for over 5,000 dashboards. 

Relentless Commitment to Agile Product Development and Operational Excellence:

• GoodData delivered over 20 new releases in 2011.
• Key releases included enhanced UI, reporting, dashboards, charting, and expanded API capabilities.
• GoodData customers experienced over 99% uptime.

Direct Customer Wins:

• Industry leaders in the high technology, ecommerce, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), and financial services industries adopted GoodData faster than any other Business Intelligence technology platform.
• Key customer wins include Carbonite, Living Social, Pandora, Time Warner Cable, and Zinch. 

GoodData Embedded in More Solutions (Powered by GoodData): 

• Market changers, including Coupa, Pardot, Genius, Compare Networks, Twilio, and Demandware, choose GoodData to power vital reporting, data visualization, and analytics.

About GoodData
GoodData is a disruptive, cloud-based enterprise platform for business intelligence. The GoodData technology is intuitive, secure and fast. It helps convert big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives. GoodData is trusted by companies like Enterasys, Capgemini, and Software AG, and embedded into offerings from cloud innovators like Zendesk, Get Satisfaction and Pardot. Headquartered in San Francisco, GoodData is privately held and backed by leading venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners.

While pursuing his MBA at Berkeley, Palan’s statistics professor told the class that whoever submits a paper with a pie chart in it would automatically fail.

So, instead of dedicating an entire day to it—and to ensure the graduate students of Berkeley pass statistics—we give it room to shine under the dashboard spotlight—sometimes.

Don’t confuse your love of pie with your love for pie charts. There are several circumstances under which pie charts should not be used:

• Too much data. When it comes to dashboards, data should be displayed as simple as possible. If there are a lot of components within a given set of data, don’t try to cram them all into one pie chart. As a rule of thumb, pie charts should not display more than six different categories of data.
• Too-similar data. If you are working with values that are similar to one another, avoid using pie charts altogether. Unlike a real pie, pie charts should be sliced and served disproportionately for clear and easy comparisons.
• Negative numbers or actual values. A complete and functional pie chart needs to include 100 percent of the data collected. If you are working with numbers that are negative or need to be displayed as actual values, choose a chart that allows for more flexibility.
• Limited space. Pie charts can take up a lot of space, so they should only be used if there is room and don’t interfere with other dashboard metrics. Remember, your data should always be displayed on a single screen with attention given to the most important data first.
• Don't cop out. It’s important to remember that there are many different ways to display data—and 99% of the time they're better than a pie chart. So before settling on a pie chart, exhaust all other options. 

As for you, apple pie, you’re welcome around anytime.  

Graphic: Image of an actual pie as a pie chart (from Daniel Pink)

For executives and others who manage by the metrics, one acronym is paramount: KPIs.

Simply put, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are predefined measurements that are used to monitor a company’s performance and progress. These quantifiable and practical measurements track the progress of a business toward its goals and play a critical role in helping companies make smart decisions to meet their targeted objectives.

Like most analytics tools KPIs should be customized and tailored specifically to each company — while a university may want to measure the percentage of students who are placed in jobs after graduation, a retail store may be more concerned with the percentage of transactions completed within a given timeframe.

The speed at which KPIs are analyzed varies from business to business, as well. Depending on the type of business, data is collected at different rates and times. This variance mostly has to do how volatile an industry the business is in and how responsive it typically needs to be to stay competitive.

For most companies, choosing which KPIs to track is the hardest part of the process. If you aren’t sure what to measure, GoodData can help.  As an example, we’ve identified five KPIs every marketer should track.

But, regardless of which KPIs different businesses choose to implement, all KPIs should be measurable and relevant. GoodData provides simple, quantifiable indicators to help any business measure its performance through strategic data collection and specific statistical analysis.

GoodData’s custom analytics tools are designed to identify and implement the specific KPIs for your business to meet its goals and objectives by providing accurate feedback that will help you make smart decisions for the future of your company. If you’re not tracking KPIs, why not start now?

“We strive to give business users an out of the box BI experience without the complication and headaches of traditional business intelligence," said Cody Crnkovich, Senior Director, Powered by Partnerships, GoodData. "Janova Analtyics is yet another example of GoodData helping companies put reporting and analytics in the forefront of businesses."

“Janova is providing value-added data to our customer base by launching this partnership with GoodData,” said Jeff Lusenhop, founder and chief executive officer, Janova. “Janova Analytics is easy to use, yet powerful and customizable to meet the needs of our users. This added functionality gives our users yet another advantage, further setting the revolutionary cloud-based Janova solution apart from the competition.”

About GoodData
GoodData offers the world's most powerful Cloud BI Platform, providing our customers and partners with operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is trusted by companies like Enterasys Networks, Capgemini, and Software AG, and embedded into offerings from cloud innovators like Zendesk, Get Satisfaction and Pardot. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at http://www.gooddata.com

About Janova
Janova, based in New Albany, Ohio, is a provider of web-based, automated software testing solutions designed to streamline the often cumbersome task of software development and implementation. Janova’s solutions are based on years of experience consulting with companies who struggled to find an efficient way to test software. Leveraging the power of the cloud, Janova solutions are English-based and easy to implement, with no equipment investment and nothing to download. Janova requires no long-term commitment and offers free support with packages available to fit any size organization, from a single user up to the enterprise. View a demo or sign up for a free 15-day trial at http://www.janova.us

In the past decade, a monumental shift has starting taking place. The world of big data has arrived, ushering in a new metrics-centric business climate. With the remarkable proliferation of available data, it’s impossible to use archaic tools to find the signal in the noise. BI is no longer just about delivering facts, it’s about extracting insights, trends and patterns in data that help businesses understand the past and present, and make smart decisions for the future.

Fortunately, BI systems have moved from complex infrastructure investments toward simpler, more agile platforms. They’ve become more flexible, easier to scale and, most importantly, much faster to deploy. Companies of all sizes now have access to operational dashboards that update nearly in real-time.

GoodData, and similar cloud-based BI tools, are significantly less expensive, ready on-demand and increasingly more accessible. As a result, larger and more obscure data sets can be collected, harnessing a jaw-dropping array of raw digital inputs from nearly every internal and external aspect of business.

Just having access to more data doesn’t make it more useful. It takes advanced analytics and operational dashboards, all built on a solid platform with data warehousing and integration. With all these key pieces in place, businesspeople have at their fingertips aggregated, relevant, actionable data they can use to make important business decisions.

The value of real-time data has become clear. Cloud-based service models, like GoodData, bring BI out of the boardroom and into the hands of employees who drive daily business decisions at companies of all sizes. IT departments have gone from spending 75% of their efforts on low-value plumbing to channeling 75% of their time delivering business value.

The future of serviced-based BI is bright, and GoodData is already leading the revolution, with its agile, on-demand, approachable — and proven — platform. From the C-suite to analysts cubicles, people are transforming their businesses through metrics-driven decision-making. It’s an exciting innovation and we’ve only just begun.

And how about you?  What BI platform is your company using and what do you love about it?