Roman Stanek

Archive for 2010

The Masses Against The Classes

In BI, Work, cloud on July 20, 2010 at 11:44 am

“When you open BI to the masses, people get a taste of what they can do and start demanding more and more information and analytics” Dan Vesset, IDC analyst, Computerworld, June 21, 2004

“Let them eat cake”. Marie Antoinette, Versailles, 1789

I’ve always found the BI industry’s fascination with elitism a throwback to the old days of IT. It seems that most of the industry calls users with no access to their tools “the masses”. And it gets worse. Bloggers from Endeca call them half jokingly “the angry mobs” and SAP has BI for “the rest of us”. All these words describe a business user who doesn’t have the time or skills to operate a complex BI solution designed for electrical engineers (who go by the name of IT). BI has penetration rate of 10% and everybody else is “the rest of us”.

It’s not just BI. The telco industry thinks their customers reside in “the last mile” – as far away from what’s important (the core of the network) as you can get. Shouldn’t their customers be in “the first mile”? And now BI is adopting the same “last mile” language, and the intent is the same: “keep my business users as far away as possible so I can focus on the core of my BI system.”

Making BI accessible to the “angry mobs” is in contradiction with BI industry’s quest for ever more complexity and hype. Petabyte warehouses, data visualization, social media analytics, predictive clustering, corporate performance management are the current industry buzzwords. Press releases and PowerPoint charts are full of names like Pig, Hadoop and Hive. These trends and tools were designed for the selected few; not for the average business user.

My vision for GoodData was always very different. Our goal is to get rid of the convoluted BI value chain. We are using the economics of the cloud to offer a service that can be used by a business audience. I am on a personal mission to support “the masses against the classes” and to build BI that is not a dumbed down version of an expensive, complex and brittle enterprise solution. I’ve always believed that the enterprise data warehouse is the place where data goes to die, leaving the poor business users with Excel spreadmarts.

This is why we just announced a fully integrated and free service: GoodData for Zendesk. Every Zendesk Plus+ customer gets free analytics from us; and the setup time is less than 5 minutes. And why free? We actually believe in what Dan Vesset wrote back in 2004. That once our users get a taste of what they can do with it they will start demanding more and more information and analytics. GoodData is BI for the business user. Something the elitist industry will call BI for “the masses”, “angry mobs” or even “the rest of us”…

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With friends like Forrester and Gartner, IBM and SAP don’t need enemies…

In BI, Work, cloud on February 15, 2010 at 7:21 pm


The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is my favorite business book – its main idea (disruptive technologies serve new customer groups and “low-end” markets first) was the guiding principle of all my startups. The best part is that even though everybody can read about the power of disruptive technologies, there is no defense against them. Vendors can’t help themselves. They study The Innovator’s Dilemma, pay Christensen to speak to their managers, but their existing customer base and “brand promise” prevent them from releasing products that are limited, incomplete or outright “crappy.” That’s what makes them disruptive. And industry analysts seem to be the only hi-tech constituency that has either never read Christensen, or is still in absolute denial about it. It makes sense: a book claiming that “technology supply may not equal market demand” is heresy for people who spend their lives focused primarily on the technology supply side.

Christensen argues that vendors no longer develop features to satisfy their users, but just to maintain the price points and maintenance charges (can you name a new Excel feature?). But in many cases the vendor decisions are driven more by industry analysts and their longer and longer feature-list questionnaires. The criteria for inclusion into the Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves seem to be copied straight from Christensen’s chapter: “Performance oversupply and the evolution of product competition”. Analysts are the best supporters that startups can have: they are being paid by the incumbents to keep them on a path of “performance oversupply”, making them so vulnerable to young vendors “not approved” by the same analysts!

Forester BI analyst Boris Evelson gives us a great example of this point in his blog about “Bottom Up And Top Down Approaches To Estimating Costs For A Single BI Report”. While Boris is a super smart BI analyst, he somehow failed to observe that his price point of $2,000 to $20,000 per report opens a huge space for economic disruption of the BI market. Anybody interested in power of disruptive technology in BI should listen to a recent GoodData webinar with Tina Babbi (VP of Sales and Services Operations at TriNet). Tina described how the economics of Cloud BI enabled her to shift TriNet’s sales organization “from anecdotal to analytical”. This would not be possible in the luxury-good version of BI, where each report costs thousands. Fortunately, Tina is paying less for a year for a “sales pipeline analytics” service delivered by GoodData than the established vendors would charge for a single report.

I hope Boris’ blog post will appear in one of the future editions of The Innovators Dilemma as a textbook example of how leading analysts failed to recognize that established products are being pushed aside by newer and cheaper products that, over time, get better and become a serious threat. And with friends like Forrester and Gartner, the incumbents don’t really need young and nimble enemies…