GoodData Brings Big Data To Business Users With New BI Toolset

The two new apps, dubbed GoodSuccess Bash and GoodSupport Bash, are the latest additions to GoodData's growing portfolio of BI apps, or "Bashes," for big data analytics. Like the rest of the San Francisco-based startup's family of apps, the new GoodSuccess and GoodSupport Bashes are aimed at helping businesses better monitor and improve their customers' buying experience, explained Mike Smitheman, vice president of Marketing at GoodData.

"[GoodData] takes the world of big data that exists today, which is often a very technical conversation, and makes that data more valuable to business users," Smitheman said. "We launched this strategy, which we call 'BizData Monetization,' which is really about extracting the relevant parts of big data within an organization and putting it in the hands of business users to make business decisions."

[Related: SiSense Offers 'Big Data' Analysis Through Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform ]

GoodData last year launched BI tools for pre-sales efforts, called GoodSales and GoodMarketing, which tap into broader CRM and marketing automation systems to provide analysis on items like sales goals or the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign.

The new GoodSuccess and GoodSupport Bashes are meant for the post-sales stage, Smitheman explained. The apps, which can collect and process data from multiple data sources, perform ad-hoc analysis and generate both reports and dashboards.

The GoodSuccess Bash is used to track customers' satisfaction with a particular product, allowing users to assess engagement activity for key customer accounts, track renewal probabilities, and gauge the effectiveness of upsell and cross-sell strategies.

The GoodSupport Bash is tailored more toward customer service departments, providing analysis on items like customer satisfaction scores or the average time it takes a ticket to be resolved once submitted to a customer Helpdesk.

Smitheman said GoodData sells its BI big data products both directly and through the channel. The company also has a "Powered By" program, whereby other software OEMs integrate GoodData's software offerings into their own. Participating companies include Zendesk, a web-based help desk and customer support vendor, along with BrightIdea, a maker of cloud-based enterprise software suites.

Smitheman said GoodData also has a solution provider program, through which the company provides system integrators go-to-market and technical support. Moving forward, Smitheman said growing GoodData's channel beyond the 20 or so partners it has today will be a priority.

"There are definitely plans to grow that [number]," he told CRN. "Honestly, that's a big part of scaling this business. We can only be experts in so many things, so a big push for the platform development is how we easily enable those partners to build on the platform, use their own solutions and take them to market. It's definitely a strategic aspect of where we are going with the company."

PUBLISHED JAN. 31, 2013