GoodData: Transforming Big Data Into Useful Data

Posted by Tom Foremski - January 14, 2013

Big data is a ubiquitous term in a ubiquitous world of massive amounts of data but it's meaningless if it can't be converted into actionable data.

To become useful data is a tough job requiring an understanding of the underlying data and how it fits together and what questions to ask. GoodData is a company that seems to have solved some key aspects of big data, such as how to generate high quality sales leads and figure out the best ways to close deals.

I recently spoke with Roman Stanek, CEO and founder of GoodData. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Roman Stanek is a serial entrepreneur, founder of NetBeans acquired by Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, acquired by Mercury Interactive, then by Hewlett-Packard.

- He has raised more than $100m for his startups. GoodData has raised about $54m from leading VCs.

- GoodData specializes in what it calls business data monetization. It combinines business intelligence with customer data. It can attach an ROI to business data.

- Clients describe their goals and the type of people that are potential customers and GoodData processes this data with other sources of data to generate highly accurate reports about possible customers.

- Its technology "bashes" mashup a company's data on its business with information about potential customers that is gleaned from many different sources to come up with matches that represent high quality leads.

- "Bashes" become frameworks that monitor and evaluate marketing goals so that companies can figure out where to concentrate their resources. It allows analytics to become integrated into any sales process.

- GoodData creates a customized dashboard that monitors a large number of factors.

- GoodData thinks of itself as an "analyst on retainer."

- Customers can identify which of their efforts produce the best results and which deals were lost for specific reasons. It allows companies to focus on what works in generating new sales.

- GoodData "eats its own dog food" it uses it's own technologies to generate fast sales growth and more than 6,000 customers.

- Selling technology to business people is far more fulfilling than selling tech to IT people because they don't see or understand very well the business issues of their organizations.

- Headquartered in San Francisco and with engineering operations in the Czech republic.

Here is a video interview by Robert Scoble with Roman Stanek: