GoodData Extends Self-Service Capabilities of BI SaaS Application

Looking Ahead at the 2015 Business Intelligence Landscape

Now that business intelligence software has been firmly established as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, the next big challenge is encouraging more users to adopt it in lieu of desktop applications like the venerable spreadsheet.

To help achieve this goal, GoodData today released an upgrade to its namesake SaaS application that not only makes it easier to more granularly explore data, but also provides recommendations on how to go about discovering patterns within any particular set of data.

Jeff Morris, vice president of product marketing for GoodData, says the overarching goal behind the latest upgrade is to increase the self-service capabilities being made available to users of the application. To that end, GoodData is also now making it possible to more easily share data within the application or via email among select groups of users.

Morris says one of the things that distinguishes GoodData as a service is that it doesn’t simply charge based on the number of users logged into the application. Because it’s clear that users that create BI content are taxing the service more than those that simply read BI content, the fee that GoodData charges for read-only access is nominal, while the cost for creating content increases as more complex models are created.

At this juncture, there is probably more usage of BI software in the cloud than there ever was on premises. Naturally, lots of BI licenses have been sold over the years, but actual adoption has always been spotty. GoodData is among a handful of providers of BI applications delivered as a service that are trying to put an end to the BI wars in the enterprise. The company wants to stop deploying expensive, complex BI software on premises that users have historically rejected. By instead delivering them as a service, the company provides a better user experience.

It may take a while longer for the transition to BI in the cloud to fully play out. But as more end users are exposed to this class of SaaS application, the more momentum starts to build behind pushing BI into the cloud alongside customer relationship management (CRM) applications.