GoodData today announced that Enterasys Networks has deployed GoodData for Salesforce CRM via the AppExchange. GoodData provides on-demand reporting and analysis for Salesforce CRM marketing, sales and service data, enabling anyone to trend their sales pipeline over time, analyze their customer data across modules, and visualize results with customized reports and dashboards.

The announcement was made today at Dreamforce ‘09, salesforce.com’s user and developer conference held Nov. 17-20 in San Francisco.

“GoodData shares our passion for making metrics pervasive throughout our people and processes,” said Vala Afshar, Vice President, Global Technical Services, Enterasys. “It’s simple – the more people that access the metrics that drive our business, the better we perform as a company. We look forward to working with GoodData to fully realize this vision.”

Enterasys, the network infrastructure and security division of Siemens Enterprise Communications Group, is using GoodData for sales pipeline analytics, leveraging over three years of historical ’snapshot’ data to trend their sales performance, improve forecast accuracy, and build a more efficient and predictable sales process. With GoodData, Enterasys executives, sales leaders and users alike all access the power of customer analytics through dynamic dashboards directly within Salesforce CRM. Enterasys is extending GoodData to analyze marketing leads and campaigns as well as service tickets to get a deeper analytical view of their customers.

“Enterasys’ deployment of GoodData via the AppExchange is an example of how companies can realize customer success quickly and easily in the cloud,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “With GoodData’s cloud BI platform, users can deploy analytics across sales, marketing and service activity so they can manage customer relationships based on actionable data.”

“Enterasys is a great example of how BI can spread throughout a company when done right,” said Roman Stanek, Founder and CEO, GoodData. “Enterasys shares our vision that everybody should have access to customer analytics”.

Enterasys users are seeing substantial early benefits from GoodData:

• “GoodData provides us with deep insight into what is changing in our sales pipeline. This enables us to become a more efficient, metrics-driven sales organization.” – Dave Barry, Director of North America Sales Operations, Enterasys
• “GoodData provides the ease-of-use and affordability we require to broadly roll out business intelligence throughout Enterasys. GoodData’s highly intuitive user interface makes it easy to get business users productive fast, and the economics of their cloud computing platform mean I never have to worry about per-user cost. It was a no-brainer for Enterasys to select GoodData.” -Dan Petlon, Vice President, IT and Software Quality Assurance, Enterasys
• “GoodData is a rare vendor that provides both a compelling vision for the future of analytics, and delivers immediate value to our company.” – Ben Doyle, Director of IT Applications, Enterasys

About the Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com is the only proven enterprise platform for building and running business applications in the cloud. The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM applications, more than 800 ISV partner applications like those from CODA and Fujitsu, and more than 110,000 custom applications used by salesforce.com’s 62,300 customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE and Sprint Nextel.

Applications built on the Force.com platform can be easily distributed to the entire cloud computing community through salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www-dev.gooddata.com.

About Enterasys and Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group)
The SEN Group is a premier provider of end-to-end enterprise communications, including voice, network infrastructure and security solutions that use open, standards-based architectures to unify communications and business applications for a seamless collaboration experience. This award-winning “Open Communications” approach enables organizations to improve productivity and reduce costs through easy-to-deploy solutions that work within existing IT environments, delivering operational efficiencies. It is the foundation for the company’s OpenPath® commitment that enables customers to mitigate risk and cost-effectively adopt unified communications. Jointly owned by The Gores Group and Siemens AG, SEN Group companies include Siemens Enterprise Communications, Cycos, and Enterasys Networks. For more information about the SEN Group or Enterasys please visit www.siemens-enterprise.com or www.enterasys.com

GoodData today announced the immediate availability of its on-demand business intelligence service, which provides simple-to-use reporting, customizable dashboards and deep ad hoc analysis of any business data. GoodData delivers the power and flexibility to meet companies’ analytics requirements as an on-demand service, without the complexity or cost inherent in typical business intelligence solutions. For the low price of $500 per month, companies can deliver analytics to as many as 50 employees and can host approximately one year’s worth of Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, call center and any other customer or operational data. Additional data storage and employee licenses are available for a nominal fee.

“The economics of Business Intelligence are broken. Companies are tired of big budgets, 8% adoption rates and 60% project failure rates,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO, GoodData. “Starting at $500 a month, GoodData turns BI from a luxury good into an essential tool every company can use to ask questions of their business data.”

GoodData believes the time is right for a new approach to BI, and this pricing underscores GoodData’s commitment to make business intelligence available to a much wider market:

• Try GoodData for free. Anyone can try GoodData today – no sales calls, no vendor bait-and-switch, no need to struggle with software or configuration – try it today at http://www-dev.gooddata.com
• Deliver GoodData to everyone. GoodData should spread collaboratively throughout a company, that’s why we don’t believe in per-user pricing. For $500, companies can deliver BI to as many as 50 employees, and host about a year’s worth of customer and operational data
• Build on initial success. GoodData believes in agile BI. We encourage users to answer business questions iteratively, and pay for more GoodData only when they achieve initial success.

“GoodData helps me make reporting and analytics self-service for Gazelle’s business users,” said Tom Russell, Senior BI Developer, Gazelle. “Instead of dealing with the complexity of typical BI, I get an on-demand service that makes our users productive in minutes.”

GoodData is free to start, for up to 10MB of business data and 5 users. For $500 per month, GoodData delivers a 500MB data warehouse and analytics for up to 50 users. For more details on GoodData’s monthly pricing, please visit http://www-dev.gooddata.com/products/pricing/

About GoodData

GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www-dev.gooddata.com.

We are proud to be the only business intelligence company born in the cloud – we’ve been on AWS since 2007 – EC2, S3, EBS and a bit of Elastic Map Reduce thrown in for good measure.

Congratulations to the other finalists Bizo, FlightCaster, Gazaro, Involver, Motally and ReTel Technologies.

Stay tuned for more details … and a chance to show your support for GoodData.

GoodData today announced the launch of the GoodData Solution Provider Program, the next step in the company’s mission to broaden the adoption of SaaS business intelligence. With over 100 new users registering with GoodData each week, customers are beginning to access reporting and analytics services historically reserved for companies with dedicated BI staff.

“GoodData uses cloud computing to fix the broken economics of business intelligence,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “We are looking for partners who share this vision, and can help move our customers from initial success to broader adoption.”

The GoodData Solution Provider Program provides system integrators, implementation providers and independent software vendors technical assistance and go-to-market support to deliver customer analytics solutions to their clients. GoodData’s initial solution provider partners have built emerging cloud computing practices, and recognize Cloud BI as the perfect complement and extension to their businesses:

• Aiimi Limited, a UK specialist business consultant and leading provider of business intelligence solutions delivered via Software as a Service, supporting SME and Enterprise businesses across all sectors.
• Cazoomi empowers its users with the freedom of choice in Software-as-a-Service. Cazoomi’s innovative “My Automated Engineer” provides customers with the ability to self design & quote over 50 of today’s leading SaaS applications such as GoodData.
• CloudTrigger, a multi-discipline services firm focusing on Salesforce CRM, Force.com development, SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud Computing technologies to help organizations of all sizes realize more business value from their technology investments.
• Demand Solutions Group, which provides  businesses with on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERP), and eBusiness solutions.
• Edge Solutions, a software and solutions company dedicated to helping organizations gain better insight into their business, improving decision-making and enterprise performance.
• Mansa Systems, an enterprise application services provider with core competencies in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Applications Implementation, Cloud Application Development, Data Management, Business Intelligence and Mobile Application Development.
• Project Leadership Associates, whose Business Intelligence Practice Group helps companies get the most from their data assets by building business driven solutions.
  
• Severn Consulting, a leading integrator providing services to nonprofit & commercial organizations. Services include data conversion & integration, process documentation, business intelligence – reporting and analysis, configuration & support.

“Driven by budgetary pressures in a demanding economy and the increased complexity of traditional Business Intelligence deployments, our clients are taking a huge interest in Software as a Service BI solutions as a more cost-effective, lower maintenance option to conventional analytics software” says Richard Day, Director at Aiimi.

“Business Intelligence is at the core of Cazoomi,” said Clint Wilson, CIO of Cazoomi. “GoodData provides us with the killer data, analysis, and cutting edge dashboards that our customers require to run their modern businesses.”

“GoodData delivers BI in a SaaS model, which is a great fit for CloudTrigger and our customers,” said Lonnie M. Wills, CEO of CloudTrigger. “GoodData’s combination of easy-to-build dashboards and deep analytics is a powerful combination for companies leveraging SaaS and cloud computing.”

“Our Salesforce.com and NetSuite customers are clamoring for an analytics solution that will go well beyond standard reporting,” said Todd Fitzwater, Principal of Demand Solutions Group. “GoodData helps us deliver analytics cost effectively, and provides one of the most exciting user experiences we’ve seen in this space.”

“GoodData’s on-demand business intelligence model helps us meet customer requirements faster,” said Nathan Wenzel, Partner at Edge Solutions, Inc. ”All BI software should be as easy to work with as GoodData.”

“My clients are clamoring for greater insight into their customer relationships – more reports, dashboards and the ability to drill into their customer data” said Siva Devaki, Founder and CEO of Mansa Systems. “GoodData helps me deliver customer analytics in the cloud and extend my own business.”

“We are excited about bringing the Good Data platform to our customers,” said Andrew Grohe at Project Leadership Associates. “It will provide them with a scalable, cost-effective deployment path for their Business Intelligence projects.”

“Our clients immediately see the vision and value in GoodData,” said Catherine Folkes, Partner at Severn Consulting Group. “The combination of data integration and collaboration allow to them to spend their time evaluating their data for better results were in the past their efforts would have been in buying, creating and building the infrastructure.  So often by the time they were done building the infrastructure, it was too late to react to the results.”

For more details on the GoodData Solution Providers Program please visit our partners page.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, GoodData is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www-dev.gooddata.com.

“Kenneth Goldman, Executive Vice President and CFO at Black Duck Software

GoodData is Going Live at Dreamforce!

Join us as we announce GoodData for Salesforce, which is already available on the AppExchange. We will also share exciting news about innovative GoodData customers who are already achieving success with the only business intelligence service born in the cloud.

Come meet us at the GoodData booth (#1312) at the Dreamforce Cloud Expo!

• See a live demo of GoodData for Salesforce and experience the power and simplicity of customer analytics: trend your sales pipeline over time, analyze your customer data across modules, and visualize results with customized reports and dashboards.
• Hear from early GoodData customers about their success with GoodData
• Meet GoodData partners, and discover why partnering with us is a good move
• Win a Voltaic Converter solar charger backpack. We’ll be giving away two solar backpacks each day. Charge your cell phones, cameras and iPods on the go right from your backpack.

We’d love to connect with you at Dreamforce. Drop us a line if you’d like to schedule a time to meet — or just drop by!

An interesting take on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur: how to balance European roots with Silicon Valley connections, leveraging talent on both sides of the Atlantic.

Check it out – and be sure to read the comments below.

]]> http://www-dev.gooddata.com/trinet-uses-gooddata-customer-analytics/feed/ 0 http://www-dev.gooddata.com/trinet-uses-gooddata-customer-analytics/ http://www-dev.gooddata.com/trinet-uses-gooddata-customer-analytics/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:35:28 +0000 Jerome Pineau http://www-dev.gooddata.com/?p=2353 In my last post, I promised to “show you exactly” what the GoodData platform looked like. I talked about lofty goals and agile BI principles but in this post, I want to bluntly point out the “salient points” I feel are unique to our platform.  I do this from a “green user” point of view, being fairly new at GoodData (but having struggled with other BI platforms in the past) and still exploring its deep capabilities.

I feel this brings subjective (read: before the Kool-Aid) value to answering the questions most “newbies” have about GoodData. Essentially: show me what it does, what’s so special about it, and how it can help get my job done. So I’m going to drive you through a whirlwind (but detailed) tour of the GoodData platform.  I want to nail all the important points quickly.  Fasten your seat belts (and grab a coffee) this is going to be interesting.

When you log in, the first thing you see is your “application pulse”.

The application pulse is a history of all member activity on a given project. So as you can see from the screenshot, in this case, I’ve been messing with attributes, updating and annotating reports, creating metrics, and commenting (an interesting capability I will describe later).

Another thing that immediately drew my attention is the concept of “tagging”. Tagging is certainly nothing new in the Web 2.0 world (and conceptually) but I haven’t seen it applied to BI in such a nifty way before:

This fairly innocuous feature allows you to immediately categorize and pinpoint all project reports by keyword. So for example, if I click on “ranking” I will see all reports that were generated having to do with ranking metrics. Nice.

The next feature I find unique is this inherent ability to collaborate and bring people into the fold of a BI project.  Think of the project metaphor as a “walled garden”. You can invite people to the party. So instead of spending time and effort creating barriers and opaque walls around your data, GoodData encourages a more democratic “look at what I’ve got” approach to BI. You can invite people with varying levels of authority on each project, of course, but the “inclusive” (what I call intra-social) nature of this platform is truly game-changing for the world of BI in my opinion:

In this example, you can see I invited my buddy Ray into this project. This makes sense as Ray works support and knows the product inside-out. When I get in trouble or have a question, it’s really handy to have him on board so he can dig into my problem up close and personal touching the same data I am.

Moving right along, once I upload my data, I want to get a “big picture” view of the model I am using. Ideally, I want to see an ERD with clearly delineated facts and dimensions. Show me what I can measure, and show me what can I slice by.  So to do this, I navigate to my model area and examine this GoodData generated situation map:

Right away I can see I have two possible facts (measures) – those are the pink bubbles. Everything else is about my slicing paths. If I add joins to my data subsequently, the model map is updated as well. When you hover over the map, an auto-zoom feature pans along with the cursor.  This is so simple it’s hardly worth any comment. Very elegant.

Let’s talk about projects now. What are they? GoodData projects are simply folder hierarchies. I can create and name folders at will. This helps me organize my reports and analysis by topic.

I get the default “My Reports” folder with my project but I also created the HR and Sales folders specifically. Because I want to separate my HR analysis from my sales ones.  Or I can create and work on reports in My Reports and then selectively drag and drop finished product into the corresponding buckets. Again, not rocket science, but a darn nice intuitive way to let you work.

The next one is a biggie. It’s called the Slice and Dice Wizard. No it cannot core “an apple” as well. But it allows normal people (that’s most of us) to do sophisticated analytics based on a simple common capability: that of speaking English. You can just ask What and How of your data. Basically you tell the GoodData slicer what to measure (that’s your metrics, or facts), how to measure it (or them) – that’s your attributes or dimensions – and how to filter results if needed. A picture is worth a bunch of words:

You can see the wizard “knows” what measures are available to me (sales and employee) and it knows what metrics I can play with. Default metrics are automatically generated (namely SUM and AVG as you can see here) but you can define custom ones (using MAQL, the GoodData multi-dimensional query language) and here I created a NetSales metric I defined as (Sales – Costs). But here’s where this gets _really_ interesting:

In this case I expanded the How tab so I’m looking at attributes. You can see I have both states and cities in there, and all states are selected. Consequently, if I click on City, I’ll see all available cities for all states, like this:

But now, suppose I want to restrict this to just CA, like this:

When I go back to Cities, this is what I see:

In other words, GoodData automatically adjusts what I can select based on the underlying relationships in the model.  This is really huge for one simple reason: I can’t screw this up! That’s right folks. In many other products, I can easily get tangled up with incompatible combinations.  With GoodData, it’s like having a GPS to find your way around Tokyo. Good luck without it.

Quick note on filtering. GoodData has canned default filtering options:

But, as usual, there’s a way to add custom filters by clicking on Add Filter. Another example of simplicity first, depth next. It’s the 80/20 rule essentially but this helps me get stuff done very quickly (I can always refine it later on, but in the meantime, I have something to show!).

Another convenient touch: context-based right-click menus. You can control columnar and cell aspects by right-clicking on these objects. here for example, a quick right-click allows me to get a top count on all numbers in the selected column very efficiently.

Couple of nice annotation features here:

On my pivot table views, I can annotate at the cell level. When I do that, the cell gets a little “earmark”. I might want to point out some anomaly there and share that information with a colleague or perhaps a manager. I can also tag the report with a less granular comment like this:

So here I have access to a comment stream about a give report. Not only that, but each stream is persisted by snapshot. So when you take a report snapshot (a “copy” of the report and its data at a given point in time) the snapshot contains all the comment history for that report up to the time of snapshot. This means I can keep and analyze threads of “though” in time. This is awesome from an educational, documentation and historical perspective.

Let’s talk “eye candy” for a moment. As a previous Excel user, I take all the UX niceties of drag and drop and cross-tabulation (to name a few) for granted.

In this report, I can swap headers and metrics with the click of a button. As such:

This is fairly self-explanatory but quite a convenience. I can also drag and drop rows transforming them into columns and vice-versa. Notice the handy sorter controls as well.  Another bonus (actually more of a necessity in BI!) is click and plug drilling capability. It looks like this:

In this case GoodData presented me a full set of available drill-thru variables. I picked age. So when I double-click a salary cell in my report table, I will see a drill-down table of this salary aggregate by age. Navigating through OLAP hierarchies is a linchpin of BI. Making it this easy is a linchpin of GoodData.

Let’s move on to charting real quick:

I’m not going to include many pretty fancy-shmancy charts per say because everyone has seen those and to me the value is more in the UX flexibility allowing quick “trial and error” configuration. This is what this does:

I can drag and drop attributes and metrics onto various axes and color codes. Advanced configuration allows me to tilt and angle text on charts, define custom number display formats and numerous other convenient tidbits that simply make life easier (and more striking).

And finally, as part of this relatively short introduction, I want to talk about the dashboards that make all this analysis actionable.

I can push reports out to dashboards in a tabbed visualization paradigm. If I click on the title, I go right back to my report where I can change and edit anything I need. And as if that weren’t enough, I can “mashup” reports and dashboard with external platforms like iGoogle, for example (you can see the share button next to the dropdown box):

When you click share, you can add directly to another site (iGoogle in this case) or copy/paste the iframe script for the report! In iGoogle, it looks like this:

Of course in this example, I have a dashboard and a report I mashed together from GoodData.

Many vendors talk about solving BI pain points. Some take the technology route (it’s a tool/infrastructure problem), others tackle it from a PM or workflow perspective (it’s a people/process problem). In our opinion, a more comprehensive approach is needed in addressing both technical and “social” bottlenecks simultaneously.

This is essentially what GoodData brings to the table. Successful BI-enabling platforms should let you be agile:

Start simply but ramp up quickly.
By making you productive from day one while providing natural paths to richer, deeper functionality as needed.

Prototype early.
By providing a flexible user experience encouraging “train-of-thought” experimentation and on-the-fly implementation to expose data problems early.

Turnaround quickly.
By letting you produce often and fast in a nimble way.

Wow customers.
By bringing together the BI and business world in a cooperative environment.

Manage change.
By allowing you to initiate, manage and absorb changes seamlessly.

Embrace Transparency.
By making it easy to involve stakeholders early and often, to collaborate openly in real time, and to share results frequently.

Integrate, extend and customize.
By talking nicely to external applications, and providing a rich open API.

Learn and have fun.
By leveraging past experience and tapping into a vibrant community of your peers.

The GoodData platform was designed with these agile genes in mind from the ground up. And in subsequent posts, I’ll show you exactly how. It’s a reasonable way to map a clear, well-defined path to BI success. And as GoodData is conveniently located in the cloud, winning at BI is now within everyone’s reach. All it takes is a browser, business data, and a need to visualize, slice/dice, analyze, and share it.

Black Duck Software, a global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, has selected GoodData as its on demand business intelligence service. Black Duck takes advantage of GoodData’s Safe Harbor program for former LucidEra customers, which offers the same Salesforce.com lead & pipeline analysis application customers enjoyed with LucidEra before the company ceased operations.

“Selecting GoodData was pretty simple,” said Kenneth Goldman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Black Duck Software. “GoodData provides a simple and affordable way for us to analyze our customer behaviors over time. The better we identify which users at which companies through which channels convert to paid customers, the faster we can grow our business.”

Black Duck Software is planning to use GoodData to analyze marketing lead and sales opportunity data resident in their Salesforce system. Critical for Black Duck is an on-demand system that can capture and analyze four years of historical data around customer behavior – tracking initial interest, trial usage and conversion into paid customers.

“More and more companies are interested in customer analytics, whether it’s digging into their sales pipeline, marketing leads or service & support levels,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and ceo. “We are happy to help Black Duck make it easier to ask the right questions of their customer data.”

About GoodData
GoodData uses Cloud BI to put the customer at the center of how you understand your business. For businesses, this means an easy way to analyze customer data across CRM, marketing, support and other systems, report on what’s working, and identify successful customer relationships. Technical users get a cloud-based business intelligence service to securely host data from any source, build interactive dashboards and reports, perform ad hoc analysis and collaborate around the results. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, GoodData is free to start, simple to use, and costs a whole lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco, but located in the cloud at www-dev.gooddata.com.

About Black Duck Software
Black Duck Software is the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with open source reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities, unsupported open source and version proliferation. Black Duck Software is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

Learn more about GoodData for Salesforce, or email us if you’re interested.