Why We Chose GoodData as Our Core Business Partner

Five years ago today, Keboola cold-called the fledgling GoodData offices. We were looking for a solution to provide some of our customers with business intelligence (BI), and found GoodData. We didn’t know during that first call that our partnership would last all these years, pivot our business, and inspire revenue hyper-growth, but we knew that GoodData was full of similarly-minded “data geeks.” Since becoming GoodData’s ongoing implementation partner, we’ve never regretted that late-fall cold call.

Although Keboola originally set out to find an analytics partner to accelerate our cloud BI implementations, we’ve found much more with GoodData. Since we have been using the GoodData platform for over five years, we know it almost as well as those who built it. This gives us insight into its implementation and use, which we pass on to our customers. Their infrastructure has allowed us to deliver award-winning advanced analytics to large customers with complex projects.

We were also early adopters of cloud BI implementations. When we became GoodData’s first implementation partner in 2009, there were very few cloud BI providers. An even smaller number of organizations were dedicated to creating implementations, especially custom implementations. We were uniquely positioned from the start, allowing us to truly own our partnership with GoodData.

From the moment we connected, we knew that GoodData was the right choice. GoodData helped to grow our business, and their commitment to customers showed — even in the early platform improvements. Because of our partnership, we decided to pivot early on, changing our primary function to custom implementations of GoodData’s Open Analytics Platform.

We build on GoodData’s Open Analytics Platform in three main ways:

1. Deepening Customer Interactions

Keboola helped Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) when they first implemented GoodData in their workflow and also boosted their understanding of analytics to get the most out of their resources. As CSC’s Director of Digital Marketing, Chris Marin, has said, “Keboola challenged us to explore new ways to use the product beyond dashboarding, saying ‘Why buy a Ferrari just to take it to the corner store?’”

With Keboola’s help, CSC was quickly building pipeline, attribution, scoring, and other models within GoodData that they thought they’d have to create in other systems, all within a fraction of the time they had expected.

2. Speeding Implementation for Powered by GoodData customers

Being an implementation partner also means that Keboola keeps GoodData platform integration fast and agile. For GoodData and Keboola customer Mindflash, this means that a custom implementation of embedded analytics into their platform took less than 90 days.

Randhir Vieira, VP of Product at Mindflash, has said that “As a SaaS company, we know what great looks like when it comes to implementation. Keboola hit the nail right on the head.”

3. Training Every User To Be an Analytics Expert

In addition to successful and scalable implementations, Keboola also shares its expertise in the GoodData platform through Keboola Academy.

In a curriculum that they describe as “Montessori meets software training,” they provide hands-on, online courses at your own pace on dashboard use, custom report building, and dashboard design. When you complete a course, you not only become an expert in analytics, but you receive one of Keboola’s customized badges, bringing the “fun” back to “data fundamentals.” Some of Keboola Academy’s newest offerings are custom solution-specific courses for GoodData partners, such as a whole curriculum helping Zendesk customers take full advantage of Zendesk Insights.

Keboola Academy online courses provided an alternative and addition to the GoodData instructor-led training. As Ray Light, Director of Training at GoodData, has said: “I enjoyed the hands-on exercises. I felt the step-by-step approach was very helpful to learn different features at a good pace.”

Of course, there are many other custom implementations and training we could discuss. If you’d like to learn more about our solutions or training, check out our resources or Keboola Academy.

This pivot to focusing on implementation of the GoodData platform paid off: in our first year of partnership, we experienced 400% revenue growth and were able to put ourselves on the map. Over 90% of our revenue was driven by the GoodData implementations of marketing programs. Suddenly our team of “data geeks” had gone from niche players to widely known cloud BI experts.

Our goal is the same today as it was in 2009: to provide fast, smooth launches of the GoodData platform in unique ways, increasing time to value for our customers. Even after five years of working with GoodData, we are still excited to create new implementations based on the powerful Open Analytics Platform.

We’ve never regretted betting on GoodData from the very beginning. They’ve exceeded our expectations as a partner in every way, and we couldn’t be more proud to announce our five-year anniversary with the only end-to-end analytics solution in the cloud.