GoodData's High Potential PaaS Strategy

According to a recent published report, the global big data analytics market is estimated to grow at 30% annually to $40.6 billion by 2023. San Francisco-based GoodData is making a mark in the market.

GoodData’s Offerings

GoodData was founded in 2008 by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek to change the way that businesses make decisions. Unlike traditional data analytics solutions that were based on expensive and slow data warehouses, GoodData’s cloud-based solution helps organizations manage, analyze, and visualize data from one environment. Its tools help organizations mine company experiences, best practices, and user interactions for improved decision making. It has built a platform that has focused on retail, financial services, insurance, and the ISV industries.

As GoodData continues to expand its use cases, it recently entered into a partnership with Vertica, an industry leading analytical database from Micro Focus that has been built to provide a range of deployment models. As part of the partnership, the two companies will now provide infinite scalability and flexibility and help their customers get insights 10-50 times faster than legacy databases and data warehouses. Together the two players will focus on the gathering and analyzing data from the rapidly expanding IoT environment.

GoodData’s products are receiving positive reviews. In a recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report, the company was tagged as the leader in analytics and business intelligence platforms based on its easy-to-use platform that supports the analytic workflow.

GoodData’s Financials

GoodData earns revenues by charging a volume-based fee for data processed through its platform. Being privately held, it does not disclose detailed financials. Owler estimates its current annual revenues at $29.6 million. Profitability figures are not available. Back in 2013, when I had met with the founder, he had mentioned that the company was trending at revenues of more than $15 million.

GoodData has been venture funded so far with $115.6 million in funding from investors including Zendesk, Intel Capital, Almaz Capital, Pharus Capital Management, Next World Capital, TOTVS, Tenaya Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Danhua Capital, Windcrest Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Next World Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Ben Horowitz. Its last funding was held in November 2018 when it raised $24 million in an equity and venture debt round. Equity investment in the funding round was led by Zendesk. Valuation at the time of funding is not known.

GoodData’s Platform Strategy

GoodData operates a developer program that provides them with access to a rich set of APIs and development frameworks. These tools are useful in integrating with existing development, data, and UI stack. Developers have access to language bindings for Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Python, and more and can leverage APIs for platform provisioning, configuration, and management. It provides them with access to a highly flexible UI so they can build capabilities that can be embedded anywhere. It allows developers to use SDKs for major programming language, create an analytic workspace, update data models on the fly, run an analytic query, or start a background task with a single line of code.

While GoodData has opened its platform for third party developers to build tools, it does not yet offer an app marketplace where users can leverage other third party developed apps. I believe by opening the marketplace service, GoodData can help these developers monetize the applications that they are building and offer them as complementary use-cases for its own basic application.

GoodData’s platform can spawn numerous applications and use cases in numerous verticals. It is the kind of company that I am particularly excited about for reasons I have discussed earlier in Calling All PaaS Leaders.

?Looking For Some Hands-On Advice?

For entrepreneurs who want to discuss their specific businesses with me, I’m very happy to assess your situation during my free online 1Mby1M Roundtables, held almost every week. If you are visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, come meet me at an upcoming Rendezvous meetup. You can also check out my LinkedIn Learning course here, my Lynda.com Bootstrapping course here, and to follow my writings, click Follow from here.

Photo credit: Petr Ocasek/Flickr.com