CleverMaps Pioneers Data Storytelling With Cloud-Native Analytics, Powered by GoodData

CleverMaps Solves Location-Related Problems

Ondřej Tomas, Jiří Žaloudek, and Lukas Puchrik are co-founders of CleverMaps, a map-based analytics platform transforming how the world is using data to solve location-related problems. The company’s solutions provide insights to support strategic decisions about any location-related business queries. Since its founding in 2013, the Czech Republic-based company has successfully delivered more than 100 projects across 20 countries and a diverse range of industries including retail, insurance, banking, real estate, delivery services, and more.

CleverMaps Enhances Storytelling With GoodData.CN

The CleverMaps platform was designed to prioritize business intelligence (BI) logic when leveraging location data. The intent was to simplify datadriven decision-making for the business users of CleverMaps’ clients with interactive maps and relevant business insights. This led to the creation of CleverMaps Stories, a new integrated solution where maps and dashboards are presented side by side with historical company information and realtime location data. The visualization of data on an interactive map is easy to understand and provides deeper insights for the customer.

After launching, CleverMaps found that decisionmakers with limited analytical experience still struggled to understand and interpret the data. The team learned that more data is not the key for better decisions. Rather, the key for better decisionmaking is the correct representation, interpretation, and context of the analytic insights. To address this, the company committed to providing better data storytelling capabilities for customers to combine location intelligence insights with BI visualizations.

Initially, the team leveraged Tableau for this purpose but soon found themselves dealing with a complicated process where data analytics took place on both the CleverMaps and Tableau platforms, and visualizations from both needed to be manually embedded onto one webpage.

The CleverMaps team needed a more efficient way to process and visualize large data sets quickly.

In 2020, CleverMaps was invited to participate in the GoodData.CN beta testing program. (As a former director of engineering at GoodData, Žaloudek knew of GoodData’s unique approach to data analytics.) Though initially attracted to its flexible pricing strategy, the team soon discovered that integrating GoodData.CN allowed them to deliver location insights combined with GoodData’s BI visualizations (e.g., heatmap table, bubble chart, scatter plot, or treemap) in a much more effective and impactful manner, because the CleverMaps platforms could use one data warehouse.

A Seamless Transition to an Integrated, Cloud-Native Infrastructure

GoodData.CN enables companies to deploy on any cloud platform, giving developers flexibility and eliminating the need to move or copy data. This reduces costs, improves efficiency, and enables real-time analytics by decreasing latency. For CleverMaps, this meant that the integration with their platform was seamless and immediately enhanced their business intelligence capabilities.

With previous BI vendors, data preparation and analysis had to be done separately for each analytical tool involved, and then the views were embedded to a static webpage.

Due to GoodData.CN’s headless BI design, CleverMaps was able to tap into a non-proprietary, API-first engine to access a single enterprise-wide source of metrics and insights. After connecting the frontend of their platform to the GoodData backend, it was easier to visualize data and embed client-specific reports anywhere on a page without having to worry about performance.

The simplicity and flexibility of GoodData.CN’s design resulted in workflow improvements for both end users and CleverMaps developers alike. Developers no longer had to create complicated ETL processes every time they updated data. Instead, they could utilize a single data warehouse and deliver more interactive, effective visualizations to their customers.

GoodData.CN Empowering Business Performance and Efficiency

With GoodData.CN deployed, the resulting new, simplified architecture helped CleverMaps achieve more agile operations. But to really show its new capabilities to the masses, CleverMaps created a demo project using San Francisco traffic accident data from 2016 to 2020, showcasing the integration of CleverMaps and GoodData.CN in one storytelling display. CleverMaps was able to use the GoodData.CN beta program to deploy and build its first proof of concept with location based data in only 21 days. The feat highlighted how GoodData.CN’s flexible, real-time analytics, combined with CleverMaps location-related expertise, can seamlessly turn complex data problems into interactive applications.

Looking ahead, CleverMaps plans to further its integration with GoodData. As a next step, the company will leverage GoodData hierarchical workspaces to automate data distribution and eliminate dataset copying and sharing.

“I would recommend GoodData.CN to anyone who wants to build an end-to-end application for their own customer,” said Tomas. “A big advantage was the pricing. With GoodData, you can host the solution on its own, leverage the flat prices of cloud providers, and predict the cost per workspace — that’s hard to beat.”