GoodData brings data to life and can make BIG DATA small. Quickly, cost effectively, easy to use, and incredibly efficent. I'd Strongly Recommend.
December 06, 2013

GoodData brings data to life and can make BIG DATA small. Quickly, cost effectively, easy to use, and incredibly efficent. I'd Strongly Recommend.

Robert J. Moreau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • Cloud/SaaS

Overall Satisfaction

  • Time to Value: GoodData is an excellent product. Having wide exposure to many products companies and solutions within the business intelligence, marketing, and sales technology space I have followed BI and the need for better annalytics closely over the past 7-8. One of the biggest challenges many companies have when acquiring a BI platform is the time it takes to get some value from it. Some can take months if note years to truly get an organization some value from them. GoodData is one of the best BI solutions to enable companies to quickly (within weeks) get direct value from it. They have developed specific solutions for Sales, Marketing and Service that for the vast majorty of companies accomplishes everything they need and then some.
  • Ease of Use: One of the strongest and best things about GoodData is it's ease of use. The UI is great, much easier to get-up-to speed on than other more complex BI platforms and they (the company) is very committed to its customers success. Many companies can learn GoodData by just watching web videos and going through some very brief and basic training. However, GoodData can also come onsite or offers training in a variety of markets and via web for companies where that is more suitable for them.
  • Strong Dashboards: GoodData is very strong in the area of dashboards and visual analytics. I consult with many clients big (Fortune 100) and SMB so the complexities and needs vary widely. However, one thing that stays consistent is data is just data unless you can effectively aggregate the right data sources, gain insight from those sources and be able to use that insight to take action that can positively impact your companies business decisions. The vast majority of people are visual learners and and virtually every executive I've worked with prefers to see things visually before diving into the "numbers" when weighing important business decisions. GoodData really gets it here making it easy for companies to visually show very complex and important data sets while still providing options to show more detailed views and "drill downs" if necessary.
  • "Powered by GoodData": For many companies this is probably one of the most exciting things about GoodData and the options in which they bring their solution to market. For those companies who wish to leverage the power and flexibility of the GoodData technology but would rather "white label" or leverage the technology under their own brand, GoodData allows companies to leverage their technology just as if it was their own. Many ad-agencies, and end users find this incredibly valuable.
  • Metadata Objects/Management (dimensions, report layouts and measurements): As deployments get larger and companies demand more scalability with thei BI platforms this becomes increasingly important. GoodData does a good job of helping their customers scale and adress some of these issues as you look accross departments and differentiating data sets.
  • High Standards of Up-Time: GoodData guarantees 99.5% uptime in the SLA's and I am yet to run into or talk to a customer that has had a challenge in this area. The company and it's engineers seem very committed to this aspect of their business and it seems to show with the clients I speak to in terms of satisfaction.
  • GoodData Support: GoodData has a very robust support portal and best practice resources for it's clients.
  • Price: When comparing the cost of GoodData to other solutions in the market like IBM-Cognos, Tableau or Oracle BI it is less expensive to deploy and get up and running. Cost is one of the driving factors I use when evaluating BI solutions on behalf of my clients and that is also one of the biggest factors companeis use when doing the evaluation internally. In today's cost conscious environment I would be remiss not to include this as a strong point for GoodData as well.
  • GoodData was built from the ground up to be a cloud based product. This brings many benefits but to some companies it can also present some challenges in terms of security and adherence to internal policies as it relates to data security and accessibility. GoodData has a great track record of security but not every CIO/CTO can leverage an exclusive cloud environment due to corporate or government based regulations or feels comfortable with their (or their customers) sensitive data being in the cloud. This can be especially true in vertical markets such as financial services, medical and banking so finding a solution to this issue would be one area I might say they need to address...
  • Because I have sensitive visability into many of my clients information (some public companies) I am unable to give specific company names but some highlights of specific benefits I have seen include:
  • Reporting Efficency: In one clients case they saw a 79% drop in the time it took to pull and analyze reports. So much so they were able to reduce head count within a department, saving a great deal of money as well.
  • Better Customer Service: In another clients case they were able to reduce customeri ssues/problem tickets by as much as 40% by using the Gooddata platform. They got much higher visability into where in the customers journey there were challenges and then used Goodata to gain a better understanding of the problem (s) and better identify solutions giving their customer service team more power to make better decisions.
  • Multi-Data Integration/Better Insights: With GoodData a customer can integrate and align virtualy any data source. In ones case it included Salesforce.com, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Eloqua, Box and some internal data sets and sources. Bringing all these together in one platform created tremendous benefit in the areas of additional insight for more targeted marketing messaging, higher ability to enable sales and better visability into their social media efforts. This helped align sales and marketing efforts to drive more revenue and higher customer renewals.
Each client I have worked with and spoken too has renewed their GoodData subscription. I know of not one to date that has cancelled. The GoodData platform has a very high rate of renewal from the discussions I have had with their internal teams as well.
With any important corporate initiative, especially business intelligence, you need to create an effective plan and gain executive/stakeholder buy-in first. Then making sure you have the right people, processes and technologies to accomplish the objective comes next. This would be no different. You must start with the busines objecive you are trying to accomplish, once you have identified that, develop a plan and for how you will accomplish it. Be flexible through the process as things will come up that you don't expect but GoodData has a very good track record and experienced team of internal consultants as well as partners that can help you do that. Rarelly does a failed or challenging deployment have to do with the technology - it's normally created by a lack of planning or unrealistic expectations on the side of the client. I have run into a few issues of over promising within BI platform deployments but neither of those were with GoodData.