Intense Competition in Data Analytics Space

Differentiation has always pulsed at the heart of business challenges, a dilemma that now, more than ever, feels profoundly urgent. There's an innate human longing for the new, a deep-seated desire to craft and create something uniquely our own. No matter the industry, it's time for brands to reignite their faith in the transformative magic of creativity. This belief is what truly distinguishes them in a sea of competition. It's a clarion call to empower our creatives, to generously allocate budget, time, and opportunities that allow them to dive deep into their craft. They must be given the space to explore, to dream, and to master the art of weaving technology with creativity for the greater good.

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I find the above para fitting to the tee in Data Analytics – Platforms, Solutions and Service space & to BDB (https://www.bdb.ai )

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What is BDB

A unified Data Analytics Platform that provides Data Ingestion, Data Preparation, Data Catalog, Data Lineage, Data Pipeline, ETL/ELT, Data Management, Data Science, Notebook, Data Visualisation (Self Service + Governed Dashboard), Mobility on any Cloud, OnPrem, Hybrid environments using any Standard Data lake (Snowflake, AWS S3, Azure, Big query, Oracle, Mongo (any flavour), Clickhouse, Postgres etc.)

The platform is built by a single team (who has earlier spent a decade in Business Objects R&D) by investing a Decade, without External Investments from any funds.

Multiple Platforms, Multiple Options, What’s the differentiation?

D&A Platform is extremely crowded place and I come across a new platform every month, yet according to me not more than 5 Platforms are proper D&A Platforms that can stand the 'Test' of a Complex Workflow to be built. I consider BDB being one of these 5. Now building such kind of platform without investments that gives seamless analytics which is easy to learn, deploy & maintain is a key differentiation. With core team based out of India, BDB has presence in USA and UAE too. BDB when given a fair chance of POC can be extremely competitive. I have never seen anyone winning against us in POCs for enterprises ?– On feature, price, timelines!

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Enterprises have their own platforms

Almost every large enterprise in the world has built their own Customized Platform for End to End Data Analytics, but they are using either AWS or Azure or GCP or Salesforce or Databricks where Developers are in complete Control. Most of these platforms are 4-10 Years old with extremely high maintenance (Running) costs and they generally use a standard Visualization tool. They sometimes keep buying different tools for Data Catalog, Metadata management, Data lakes etc. and build their solution around Open Source Technology on Cloud. Most engineering teams are 3x-5x of the size that they should have been & spending very high Cloud bills but BDB kind of platforms were not available earlier. Today’s organizations will use BDB kind of platform to build Integrated Analytics much faster (1/3 of Time and 1/3 of Cost). (see Intense Competition Section in this article).

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Developers will resist adoption of BDB

This is natural, who will accept a new platform that easy. But this will change in a few years. 5 years back even our partners were not ready to use BDB platform but today some partners has picked it and they have built their own solutions. Their customers are happy and in fact some have won against competition by white labelling BDB platform. The success ensures the adoption.

We have trained some Developers in BDB and then asked them to try Azure or AWS, even though they picked these platforms quickly but still they like developing in BDB as it is more integrated and one can see Self Service Visualization of any Data Engineering activity being done to validate the data and requirements. Once customer are able to visualize their data, they are able to close the design faster.

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The Platform decisions should be in the hand of Management and not developers. It’s the economics of the company that is more important, developers will keep moving across the industry. The companies that leave the decision on developers eventually lands in overspending. I have seen technical leadership of any company will like BDB as they can reduce their cloud bills and achieve the functionality expected by their business teams.

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BDB has developed very strong Training Content in 10+ different verticals with realistic sample data, problem statements, videos, practice environments etc. and we have seen its effectiveness in training hundreds of people in last 5 years. We should now train thousands of people in next 5 years!

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Highlight - A new vertical solution on BDB can be made in 3-6 months.

Strength becomes weakness and vice versa

BDB is 9 years old, the first question someone asks me is how much investment you have got? This is a natural question since we have invested in 50-60 people for almost a decade on building, maintaining & enhancing the platform. The process never stops, most people understand this very well and quite a few have tried building platform in their careers.

My answer is NO Investment from “Investors”. I have got some money as appreciation from known Technical Folks who are my old colleagues and friends. ?98% of BDB Stocks is with BDB Employees!

There was so much of pressure on us to try for Investment and it was projected as if we don’t take investment than neither we can make a competitive product nor we can survive.

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I personally believe that NOT having investment for a platform company is really tough for first 10 years, but after a decade, it can become THE BIGGEST STRENGTH esp. if your platform can beat any other platform in functionality. I know 99% people will not agree with me but in a year’s time BDB gets the comfort of execution and choice. The partner community will have more confidence in BDB & it should get ready for IPO before 2028. With ARRs increasing and partners blessing BDB with more contracts, its weakness can become the strength. No one should be able to win against us on Pricing (if we want to win that contract).

Platform, Solution and Services – all are directly possible from BDB.

We want to grow with internal references and by making our partners successful. We are even building solutions for our partners for them to win more business.

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The Promise of Gen AI/LLMs

BDB is not in the business of developing LLMs but we have used them effectively in our platform, we are able to integrate with any LLM and we have integrated their workflow in our UI without charging any License. One can see our Gen AI Videos to see overall offering. We have made it so simple for our customers that they don’t have to worry about so much noise on Gen AI upgrades. The best of the solutions can be provided by BDB in a way, customers can create their workflows in an optimal way, they won’t be left behind and they won’t overspend.

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How BDB Data Engineering Works

Data Pipeline module with custom coding features is Backbone of BDB platform. The kind of training that we provide to our Data Engineers is the best in the industry. We have seen our trained data engineers are able to pick up AWS and Azure based data pipelines in couple of weeks and deliver better than others. This gives us a chance to suggest customers the benefits of BDB platform. Our data engineers have exposure to work in multiple domains and multiple complex problems to handle big data from varied data sources.

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Intense Competition esp. in India

BDB is registered as OEM in GeM (Govt E Marketplace) Portal in India and few months back we thought of building proposal for a leading PSU of India that required solution on AWS. They were open for any platform or Custom Code on AWS. In fact most companies preferred custom code via developers on AWS. We did complete estimations and we are comfortable in doing the entire contract in 9 m$ meeting all their terms of Security etc. . After couple of months we checked the actual bid amount in GeM. The best proposal was 20m$ and max. bid was of 33 m$! Now most of people will ignore and would say BDB is not having that kind of maturity, domain specialists... We have delivered much bigger and more complex projects than this one. In a few years, we will break the threshold of minimum turnover qualification and at that point there would be intense Competition from BDB. We will start working on making partners who can use our platform in the Indian ecosystem and deliver effectively. It won’t take long when Technical Leadership in PSUs, Govts will observe the quality and capability of BDB Platform.

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For Western Clients, Fortune 500 Clients, I hear that they don’t care for money and they will never sign with a small company like BDB. Well directly or indirectly we have worked with 10 Fortune 500 and 3 Fortune 50. In all cases(100%), where I have interacted with Fortune 500 and if they allowed us to a POC for them, we have been able to sign the deals – Directly or via Partners. Any great Technical Leader will find BDBs proposition exciting as they understand what it brings to the table and they are not scared like Commercial Leaders who actually don’t understand data analytics engineering process. They always believe in the saying’ One don’t gets fired for choosing IBM’, well the time has changed. Unless you can use the start-up ecosystem and take bold decisions, you can never make that kind of mark for the company. The need of the hour is to reduce cloud bills, create CDPs and go for Data Monetisation. For all of the above there is no equivalent to BDB.

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Ecosystem play and movement of Partners

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One of biggest brand in India is partnering with BDB and soon will be launching multiple solutions for SMB sector. There is another Japanese partner who has chosen BDB for their larger PSU contracts. One partner has white labelled the solution in telecom space and signing with multiple customers. One partner has built Workforce analytics and in the process of signing large deals. BDB works from behind and able to lift all kinds of partners. Some of them are able to understand our value, some may not be fully aware of D&A complexities.

It has not been easy to make such partners who are ready to take the technology of a company 1/50x of them. This requires a great mindset and only progressive technical leaders have capacity to decide against the tide.

In 2018 we started making partners, while it took almost 5 years to establish 2 partners and success rate was poor, now it is taking less than couple years to establish a partner. I see more of solution based partnerships happening in next 3 years. Next year our version 10 will be released and we are going to bring top end observability features with intuitive UX.?

Pressure of Higher Profits for Invested Companies

Investment brings intense pressure, it increases your horizon, your reach but it brings pressure of first scaling the numbers and then increasing the profits. In first stage it is very easy to compete with a company like BDB but in second stage, it’s difficult to compete as we will give reverse competition. One never knows when the investment money will deplete and company will get into intense pressure. My experience of Business Objects of a decade taught me a lot & I am able to predict the moves of most of the companies and I am clear on which companies will get sold in next 3 years in this space. Pressure of profits is mounting on many, their support is weak, wages are increasing, there is intense movement of people between similar types of companies, deliveries are no 1 issues.

Stability of Business, Teams and Increasing ARR

Most people ask me, if you don’t take investments you won’t be able to survive, You won’t be able to grow, people will leave the Org for better wages. There is a certain merit in the argument and we have seen turbulent times. But investment doesn’t guarantee stability of business. In fact if you have investor who has not understood the business flow and invested, they will always create trouble for you. Whether you are invested or not invested, it doesn’t matter, esp. when you are 9-10 yrs. Old company and you have achieved Product maturity and built certain kind of customers and partners. Don’t waste the money in area’s that doesn’t give value to your customers. We have always put our extra penny in the product. That R&D mindset has helped us in developing the platform and now business mindset will help us in scaling it organically.

As I said, issue is the deliveries, in most contracts customers are not ready to give data till last moment, there is constant changes in the scope, data patterns, data sources that using a standard Cloud platform results in creating multiple small deployments for developers that results into 50-100 $ daily cloud bill per developer. I have seen some large customer are spending xxx m$ per annum on cloud bills for Data Analytics! Some even think of using BDB at the Dev level and try to save a few million $s.

Some customers have very small use case but they want full deployment of platform (private version) that makes the implementation costly.

I still see very few customers in India are ready for Cloud based SaaS and are still on Excel and Excel based analytics. To gain the benefits of Gen AI, most companies will have to use Data Engineering Practices and clean their data. Remember Garbage IN, Garbage OUT, therefore the need of BDB kind of platforms will be ever increasing.

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With 50-70% ARR increase from existing customers & partners, we should be able to survive and grow. In next 1 year, our weakness should turn out to be a strength when we have our 10.0 version and growth potential 100% y-o-y. When we read large RFPs on Data, we are able to see 95%+ features in BDB. It will get exciting as more and more Data Professionals will start trying BDB either directly or via training institutes and universities.

If you want to try BDB, its not Free, but you can try in less than a resource cost and execute multiple use case and check out the TCO.

https://www.bdb.ai/saas