GoodData Should Enhance its Platform Strategy

According to a recent Frost and Sullivan report, the Big Data Analytics market is expected to grow 4.5 times from $14.9 billion in 2019 to $68.1 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 29%. Data discovery and visualization are expected to become more mainstream in the coming years as organizations realize the importance of data prepping, data management, and data visualization as essentials for advanced analytics.

GoodData’s Financials

Privately held, San Francisco-based GoodData is a leading player in the market. It earns revenues by charging a volume-based fee for data processed through its platform. Analysts estimate that the company was operating at revenues of $15 million in 2012 and would have scaled up to revenues of more than $200 million by 2018. 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 $141.3 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 May 2020 when it raised an undisclosed amount through its partnership with Visa. Prior to that, it had raised $24 million in an equity and venture debt round in 2018.

GoodData’s Products and Partnerships

In May this year, GoodData had announced a partnership and investment from Visa. Visa Ventures is the venture investment arm of Visa that focuses on tying up with global innovative payments, FinTech, and technology companies. Prior to the investment, Visa was GoodData’s customer. GoodData believes that the partnership will boost its leadership position as it will be able to deliver new insights for existing offerings, develop new business models, and amplify partnerships with business networks. For Visa, the partnership will provide access to data and analytics that could be helpful in enabling its clients and partners to understand the impact of the decisions being made.

Within product enhancements, GoodData recently announced the release of a new collaborative digital modeling solution. The solution brings new capabilities and tooling and enables the simplification of data modeling when a new data product is started or an existing enterprise reporting is extended. The modeler complements the data source management interface, and when integrated, it provides users with accelerated time to market for new data products. It supports GoodData’s semantic layer and the ability to simplify the data’s complexity, making it accessible to non-technical users.

GoodData’s Platform Strategy: Platform or API

GoodData provides developers with access to a rich set of APIs and development frameworks. Its tools help in integrating with existing development, data, and UI stack.

GoodData’s Platform Strategy: Developer Community

GoodData does not share metrics about its developers. It has been adding additional features to its solution to allow developers the ability to build several enhancements. Developers have access to language bindings for Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Python, and can leverage APIs for platform provisioning, configuration, and management. Its highly flexible UI allows developers to build capabilities that can be embedded anywhere. Additionally, GoodData allows developers to use SDKs for major programming languages, 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.

GoodData’s Platform Strategy: Marketplace and Metrics

GoodData has opened its platform for third party developers to build tools, but it does not offer an app marketplace where users can leverage other third party developed apps. I think that could be the next logical step for GoodData to improve its platform’s capabilities.