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Entries 3 Total

In BI, APIs are the Cloud’s OEM

Nov 10, 10 7:02 AM

To put it simply, I am in the business of building platforms.

NetBeans was the first extensible Java IDE platform with plug-ins back in 1999. Systinet had a product that was actually called Web Application & Services Platform (WASP). But both NetBeans and Systinet were “only” what my investor Marc Andreessen calls Platform Level 2:

This is the kind of platform approach that historically has been used in end-user applications to let developers build new functions that can be injected, or “plug in”, to the core system and its user interface.

(Everyone should read Marc’s excellent article on different platform levels here.)

My goals for GoodData are different. I want to build a platform that would become a one stop shop for BI developers, architects and users. A BI platform that will provide a set of APIs where developers can define their own models, schemas, queries, metrics, reports and dashboards. The highest level of Marc’s platform taxonomy:  Platform Level 3.  But here I need to quote Marc again:

Level 3 platforms are much harder to build than Level 2 platforms.

Yes. Building GoodData – a multi-tenant, scalable and open BI platform – was not easy (and we are not finished yet) but the possibilities are endless. We opened the platform to developers only a few months ago and today we are announcing a number of partnerships that are only possible because of GoodData APIs. We call this program Powered by GoodData and it is available to all developers and architects who need have access to BI functionality.

Access to BI functionality… let’s stop here for one moment. Accessing BI functionality in the world of enterprise software usually meant a build-versus-buy/OEM decision (the third option – open source BI – is as complex as the build option and as expensive in the long term as the buy option). But now GoodData gives our partners a completely new option to access BI functionality: an API call.

Instead of building, managing and operating a datawarehousing and BI stack our partners rely on our cloud-based service to deliver that functionality for them. And we are delivering BI functionality to hundreds of companies and thousands of users via API calls. It is Tuesday afternoon and our BI platform served 1,218,689 REST API calls this week. Now that’s what I call a new way of access to BI functionality. And what Marc would call a Level 3 platform.

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The Masses Against The Classes

Jul 20, 10 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…

Feb 15, 10 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…

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