Business Intelligence
as a Service
Zdenek (ZD) Svoboda, Good Data
zd@gooddata.com
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

CONTENT
• Current BI - Enterprise vs. Desktop
• New BI category - Departmental BI
• New BI Approaches: BI SaaS & Cloud Computing
• Good Data architecture overview
• Good Data demos (early beta)
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

BI - What is It All About?
• Turning data to information
• Answering questions - last month revenue,average
salary for a position, last week expenses, customer
retention, unpaid invoices
• Making decisions - raise commissions, cancel
marketing campaign
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Enterprise vs. Desktop BI
• Enterprise
• Centralized, costly, inflexible
• Desktop
• Fragmented, scales up to 10th of thousands
of rows
• Excel (as a data storage)
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Enterprise BI - no flexibility
• Centralized & heavyweight
• Doesn't scale to departments
• Complex model with limited set of centralized
enterprise data sources: ERP, CRM, HR
• Development takes years, extension months,
new report weeks
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Enterprise BI - no flexibility
• Focused on consumption of
pre-defined reports
• Lengthy report consumer to analyst cycles
• Only analyst has access to data mining
(Report Creation)
• No or severely limited “What If” analysis
No flexibility -> Fragmented individual solutions -> usage
of the Desktop BI in departments
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Desktop BI - No Visibility
• Individual solutions -> the truth is out there
• Many different and conflicting data sources
& reports (\"Excel Hell\")
• Different semantics -> different questions
• Different numbers -> different results
• No cross-comparison
No visibility -> Misalignment -> Bad decisions
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Departmental BI
• The fastest-growing BI segment
• Simple & usable -> Self service -> Flexibility
• Guided analytics, powerful visualization
• Sharing data & reports + Web accessibility +
Collaboration -> Visibility & Alignment
New BI category requires new solutions
BI SAAS + Cloud computing
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Good Data Demo
Usability & Collaboration
• Easy-to-use reporting
• Collaboration: Commenting, tagging, pulse
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

BI SaaS
• BI SaaS - accessibility, Time-to-Market,
Low risk
• New vs. established vendors
• Startups: Lucid Era, Pivot Link, Oco, Birst, Good
Data, Logi-XML
• Established: Business Objects
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

RBI - Return Before Investment
• Easy on-boarding
• Good Data project is free under 100MB of data
• Low and manageable project risk
• No up-front payments ( just sign up)
• e.g. no HW acquisition / sizing
• Start free and pay as you grow
• True zero maintenance
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

BI SaaS Approaches
• Narrow vertical solution with fixed model and
reports - Lucid Era (sales optimization)
• ASP-like hosting of an established
BI package - Oco, Pivot Link
• Report distribution layer on top of a hosted
enterprise BI - Business Objects Xelcius
• Multi-Tenant, Cloud-based BI designed and
implemented from scratch - Good Data
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

BI SAAS @ cloud
• Multi-tenant - unbeatable cost efficiency
• Massive sharing of underlying resources (CPU &
storage) by all projects
• Strict project isolation requirements (security)
• On-demand resource allocation - redundant
services are allocated on as-needed basis
• Reliability - built-in recovery from failure
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Good Data Demo
Data Upload
• Automated generation of the
analytical model
• Attributes, facts, metrics, and hierarchies
• Simple mode - flat structure, no hierarchies
• Advanced mode - composed attributes,
custom labels, hierarchies
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Good Data Architecture
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

Good Data Demo
Architecture
• Redundant stateless OLAP services
• Simple load balancing
• Amazon EC2 deployment
• REST interface (JSON/RSS/YAML/XML)
• No application server - AJAX front-end
invokes the services directly
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com

TRY IT YOURSELF !
• Sign-up at no cost at
HTTP://DEMO.GOODDATA.COM
• Try our demos - Now
• Create your own project & upload your data
(up to 100MB is free) - November
2008 © Good Data Corp. www.gooddata.com