GoodData is the realization of a vision to create a new cloud-based platform for business intelligence.

We took advantage of the latest advancements in Internet computing to break through the common BI barriers. In building GoodData we followed some simple design principles:

Users should interact with GoodData the way they interact with data and online services – this should not require an advanced degree in analytics

Performance, scalability and flexibility should not be dictated by the sacrifices business intelligence systems had to make because of client-server and early Internet architectures

Customers should be able to start simply, grow with their success, and pay for the value of the results and not for a monolithic upfront ‘solution’ that never solves anything other than keeping IT fully employed.

Business Intelligence projects should leverage agile development. Using waterfall for BI projects — with 18-24 month cycles — doesn’t make sense for many customer use cases.

The result is a unique, cloud-based BI platform that delivers the power of collaborative analytics to everyone, not just companies with teams of BI experts and million-dollar IT budgets.

What Makes GoodData Unique

Powerful Analytics Engine - Business Intelligence is traditionally one of the data center’s biggest resource hogs. Multi-dimensional analysis is very processor-intensive, and data sizes mushroom into the terabytes and beyond. For years, everyone has been forced to make tradeoffs between speed, power and cost when building analytics software. Because of this, most BI is prescriptive—pre-built dashboards answering pre-defined questions in pre-calculated OLAP analysis cubes. GoodData takes a different approach, assuming we would not be constrained by the container or the cluster. We made ad hoc analysis as fast and simple as prescriptive BI. That means new queries on new data sets are as easy as repeated queries on predicted data. Smart in-memory query processing and extensive results caching get over the performance hurdles.

Architected for the Cloud - GoodData was designed to take advantage of the processing power afforded by cloud computing, and is built with the flexibility of service-oriented architecture. Before we wrote one line of code, we knew we would be able to access CPU and storage as utilities which could scale elastically to meet our customer’s usage. We also assumed we would be unable to predict exactly how collaborative analytics would be used. So we designed an open, flexible architecture based on extensive stateless REST interfaces that can be reused and recombined easily. GoodData’s service runs on Amazon Web Services, taking advantage of cloud computing’s low cost and elastic computing model. Projects scale automatically, without any need to plan for peak loads or reconfigure servers to deal with increased usage. We pass this savings onto customers, who only pay for the services they use.

Breakthrough User Experience - Teenagers using Facebook act much differently than marketers accessing a corporate dashboard. Facebook allows discovery, whereas a traditional BI tool requires courage and know-how to drill down for insight. This rigidity and complexity is why dashboards and analytics are used only by a select few and hundreds of reports are unused, analysis is incomplete, and users are often frustrated. GoodData is changing this model, bringing the interactivity and viral nature of social software into the world of analytics. GoodData makes it easy for any user to access data, to try and discover features, learn from the collective intelligence of their project, and mash up their results outside of the application.