Big data anlytics company GoodData today announced its new GoodData Bashes products, cloud-based solutions that help companies monetize their big data and improve operational intelligence. The company’s platform aims to help companies make better decisions based on their data by providing operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing. GoodData has over 6,000 customers including Time Warner, Groupon and Zendesk, and recently raised $25 in Series C funding in July 2012.
GoodData’s Bashes are a combination of reports, analytics, apps, metrics, and best practices displayed in a visual dashboard to provide real-time analysis. Today the company is introducing Bashes for sales, marketing, and customer engagement. The goal is to enable anyone, not just data statisticians or IT professionals, to make sense of their data, and to actually act on it. “The main objective is not only to give them technical tools, the main goal is to tell them ‘this is how you should measure your business,'” said CEO Roman Stanek in an interview. “The problem with big data is that the whole discussion is too technical…my goal is essentially to translate the benefits and talk about business outcomes.”
Stanek was formerly the founder of NetBeans, acquired by Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by Mercury Interactive and later HP. He said today’s Bashes launch is about moving beyond just talking about big data, to understanding the business benefits, identifying who can use it, and monetizing it. He said the most frequent comment he hears from customers is that people don’t know what to measure, so the company has used the lessons learned since launching in 2010 to create analytics products for specific business units.
“We took those lessons learned and we combined them into industry and vertical packages. The main goal is to tell them this is how you should measure your business, this is the best practice, this is our thought leadership,” Stanek said. “If someone is sitting on tons of data about their customers, we help them to get additional revenue or additional marketing effectiveness. That’s what we call business data monetization.”
The target audience for the new product is the average business employee or marketer. Companies connect their existing enterprise accounts, for example Salesforce, Marketo, or Google Analytics, and once connected, GoodData starts producing reports on everything from the effectiveness of a marketing campaign to the lifetime value of a customer. Users can access reports in their dashboard, or via daily notifications and PDF summaries. The service also integrates into existing enterprise apps, including Salesforce, so people can view it without actually logging in to GoodData.
The Bashes start at $20,000 for 5-10 seats, with the price scaling based on the number of users. The company will be releasing Bashes for additional verticals in the next few months, potentially for customer satisfaction next (they’ve already built that tool and use it internally). As for other companies that are trying to visualize big data to make it accessible to the average business user, like DataHero, Stanek said their focus is exclusively on operational intelligence, rather than just data visualizations. “The biggest difference is that we are automating all the processes around getting the data, storing the data, analyzing the data, and the data visualization is how people experience GoodData.”
Ultimately Stanek said that the focus on usability is the most important aspect of what they do. “That’s why we are launching this first platform that allows business users to get business outcomes out of big data,” he said. According to Gartner, less than 50 percent of companies using SaaS web analytics solutions use the advanced functions including advanced reporting and customer segmentation because they’re too difficult to use. If GoodData can prove that its Bashes can actually help businesses monetize their data, they might be worth the price tag.