Syntax boosts margins with GoodData

Scaling with GoodData: turning data into dollars for Syntax

Recent acquisitions gave Syntax an opportunity to grow business intelligence (BI) adoption and success across new, larger customer sets.

Craig Kelly serves as VP of Analytics at Syntax, and led the team that brought GoodData to EmeraldVision. Syntax today serves a diverse customer base, spanning companies with $200 million to $200 billion in revenue and those at all different stages of business analytics maturity. In our conversations, Kelly stressed the importance of data-driven business: “Analytics is truly a pain point now—studies out there show that companies that are making use of their data in positive ways are outperforming the competition by 10% in revenue. It’s no longer a nice to have, it’s something successful companies need to focus on.”

GoodData-powered solution drives acquisition interest

“EmeraldVision was a differentiator during the acquisition. As a value-added service, EmeraldVision let us take customers on a journey as opposed to getting into price competitive situations with potential customers. That was an attractive piece for the acquisition,” said Kelly.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is essential to operating at scale. Successfully implemented ERPs can become the beating heart of an organization’s operations and decision making. However, deriving full value from ERPs can also prove complex and expensive. Data is often siloed in on-premise solutions, making accessing business intelligence time intensive and technically challenging.

Syntax is a leading managed cloud provider for mission-critical applications focused on transforming companies’ investments in ERPs. In 2019, the company wanted to broaden its reach and expertise beyond Oracle and SAP customers. The acquisition of EmeraldCube, a managed services company focused on JD Edwards customers, gave them the customer expansion they wanted, but also came with a powerful asset: an accessible, SaaS-based business intelligence solution called EmeraldVision.

For Syntax, GoodData-powered EmeraldVision was both an equity builder and key differentiator during the acquisition, enabling Syntax to elevate their overall offering and include business intelligence for the first time.

An evolving partnership: EmeraldCube and GoodData

In 2013, EmeraldCube’s VP of Analytics Craig Kelly had a vision for how SaaS-based analytics could transform their value for their base of JD Edwards customers – he just needed to find the right partner.

Traditional business intelligence platforms they’d worked with in the past required on-premise implementation, and were not only complex to manage, but also costly and sometimes took months to roll out.

“We wanted to come up with a more elegant solution and revolutionize the space for that particular type of ERP customer,” Kelly said. “We were looking for an innovation partner that could be a one-stop-shop and provide all the components that we needed. GoodData, with its ability to constantly add to and integrate new data sources into a subscriptionbased revenue model, was a good match.”

The GoodData platform enabled EmeraldCube to deliver embedded analytics within their existing SaaS solution. Customers didn’t have to worry about installing new software or hiring full-time employees to manage the process: it was as simple as subscribing to the monthly service. By arming customers with a seamless BI solution, EmeraldCube separated themselves from the competition.

“GoodData stood out because they maintained the platform-as-a-service and took care of all the components we were looking for — they included the ETL portion, they included the data warehouse portion in the cloud, and they created the front end with the reports and the dashboards,” Kelly said. “The platform also upgraded over time so our customers never had to worry about upgrading. EmeraldVision became a huge differentiator for us. No one else was doing anything like this.“

Becoming Syntax Vision: sophisticated analytics for ERP users

After the acquisition, Syntax built on the success of EmeraldVision. The company expanded adoption of the GoodData platform to roll out two distinct business intelligence solutions: EnterpriseCare, a plug-and-play monitoring tool for JD Edwards, and Vision.

Vision, an evolution of EmeraldVision, is a scalable business intelligence solution that delivers predeveloped mapping content from accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger. The data includes inventory, sales, purchasing, forecast analysis, capital asset management, and production and manufacturing. It can also integrate third-party datasets with ease.

“When customers leverage Vision’s full capabilities – pulling data from their ERPs systems and blending them with third party databases and Cloud based web applications – it really helps drive stickiness,” Kelly said.

The newly evolved Vision proved successful not only at improving customer usage, adoption, and satisfaction, but it also quickly made an impact on Syntax’s bottom line.

A Vision for the future

Moving forward, the Syntax team plans to leverage GoodData to build out an analytical fabric across their now expanded set of customers. In this way, they will have analytics ready with connectors already in place for all types of business architectures.

“The more we can have plays in our pocket where we already have pre built connections for Salesforce or Oracle Sales Cloud and can do things like take CRM data and blend it with data from the ERP system to present new and interesting insights that can add value to the customer, the more successful we will be,” Kelly said. “GoodData really can help you turn your data into dollars. It remains extremely relevant to our business, more so today than ever.”