We recently shot the videos below featuring our customers at Enterasys talking about GoodData. It’s great to hear directly from our customers. You can’t fake this stuff…

• Sales Analytics at Enterasys, featuring Dave Barry, Sales Ops Director extraordinaire, and Dan Petlon, who runs IT and understands why the business needs sales analytics front-and-center
• Adopting Cloud BI at Enterasys, with Ben Doyle, Enterasys rockstar Director of IT Applications, who is successfully pushing cloud adoption throughout Enterasys.

Here’s a quick example of the power GoodData brings to Market Metrix and their customers. When a hotel sees a low customer satisfaction score, they want to dig in and find out why. Is it a bad room? A bad breakfast? A bad employee? Is it a trend? Are women unhappy with certain services? Do ‘gold’ loyalty card members have higher or lower satisfaction? Or is it a bigger or more systemic issue.

In the example below – in just a few clicks – this hotel figured out that the underlying issue was directly tied to reservation source. People booking through Amadeus were unhappy. This is real actionable information.

For the first time, hotel marketers and property owners have access to this business data, and can use GoodData to slice and dice their customer sat data themselves quickly. They don’t need analytics experts on staff, or to rely on external consultants to sift through the numbers.

Hotels get a deeper sense of customer sat and loyalty, and Market Metrix gets customers that interact with their data on a daily basis.

Click on the image below to see a bigger version

Customer Satisfaction Analytics in GoodData

You can hear more about Market Metrix and how they are using GoodData on an upcoming webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST.

“Our hospitality customers have an insatiable desire to better understand data around customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said Robert Honeycutt, CEO of Market Metrix. “GoodData lets us give them a powerful tool to dig deeper, understand trends and capture more of the story behind the metrics.”

With GoodData’s customer analytics solutions, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers like Market Metrix can easily and affordably enhance their existing services with on-demand dashboards, reporting and analytics. SaaS providers can create highly repeatable analytics applications that provide a low-friction way to address increasing customer requirements for reporting and analytics.

“The economics of BI are broken for SaaS providers: too complex to build, too expensive to buy,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “GoodData brings the economic advantages of the cloud to SaaS providers, letting them embed powerful analytics at a fraction of the cost.”

Join Keith Jaeger, Vice President of Product Development at Market Metrix on a webinar on March 25, 2010 at 10am PST as he discusses the challenges of SaaS analytics and the opportunity for SaaS providers to work with GoodData. You can register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/816928338.

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Market Metrix
Market Metrix has been helping leading hospitality companies turn feedback into performance since 1996. Combining award–winning research with powerful products, Market Metrix gives clients essential information, guidance and tools to make informed business decisions. Software–as–a–Service (SaaS) based products help clients save money, improve guest and employee loyalty and gain control over the new social media wave.

Read more at InformatonWeek

The Metrics That Matter
Similar to many b2b web companies, we have a hybrid business. GoodData is both bought and sold. What this means is that there are essentially three sets of metrics that matter for us:

1. Web & Conversion. Google Analytics (traffic) plus registration stats (conversion) from our platform. Mashing up Google Analytics with our own platform stats gives us great conversion data.
2. Leads and Opportunities. Standard marketing and sales analytics – total number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads), SQLs (sales qualified leads), and opportunity pipeline tracked by stage. Most of this data is inside Salesforce – and we’re already pretty good at Salesforce CRM Analytics
3. Product Usage. As a SaaS business, we have a tremendous amount of telemetry around customer usage of our product. Getting a hold of this data can turn me into a true data-driven marketer.

Here’s a really basic example of the type of telemetry we get out of GoodData;

Our First Two Sprints
We’ve had a GoodData project with basic web, conversion and product usage data for about 9 months, which has helped us shift from anecdotes to facts when we talk about what works in our business. In 2010, the first big win for us is to incorporate our Salesforce CRM data – so we can look at all 3 categories of metrics I listed above. More important is to see product usage data from the customer’s perspective – which leads, opportunities or accounts are using which parts of our product. Once we mash up Salesforce and usage stats, we’ll be able to market and sell at a much more efficient manner.

When I say agile, I mean it: sprint #1 started February 1st and will be done by the end of February.

Please tell me what you’d like to hear about in my next post.

Download the podcast here or check out ebizQ to read the transcript.

You’ll need to download a plugin for PowerPoint called LiveWeb (choose the version corresponding to your PowerPoint). Upon downloading and decompressing, double-click the LiveWeb.ppam to install the plugin.

Let’s switch for a while to a GoodData dashboard. In the upper-left corner next to the dashboard name is a Share link. Click it and find the text snippet with the HTML code. You will need to copy the address of this dashboard which is enclosed in quotes following “src” attribute. View this screenshot to see what I mean:

Copy the text highlighted between the quotes as the address to your dashboard

Back in your PowerPoint presentation, find the Insert tab. Thanks to your new PowerPoint plugin, it should now feature a Web Page button for embedding web into your presentations:

Click it, and paste the dashboard address into the first field. Don’t forget to click the Add button, then click Next to proceed, leave the settings unchanged and click Finish.

Your presentation should now contain a big black box as a placeholder for the web page. The real dashboard is going to display only once you start running the presentation fullscreen. It is a good idea to run it once before you present – the first time the dashboard displays it will ask for your GoodData login. You can then exit/enter the presentation and dashboard again without needing to enter your password – until you exit PowerPoint completely.

Talend makes data integration a seamless piece of GoodData’s customer analytics offerings, allowing companies to focus on building the reports and dashboards that bring metrics front-and-center in their business, as opposed to solving low-level integration issues.

So what does this mean for GoodData customers:

1. Talend powers GoodData for Salesforce — this is mostly invisible to customers who buy our GoodData for Salesforce apps for marketing, sales and customer support analytics, since GoodData loads the data automatically on behalf of our customers
2. A GoodData connector for Talend is now a freely available on Talend Exchange, which means you can use Talend as an easy (and free) on-ramp for bringing practically any data into our Cloud BI platform
3. Stay tuned for more news about GoodData’s data integration architecture. Big things are coming in 2010….

For more about loading data into GoodData, how-to videos, understanding our APIs, or tips to work with GoodData, please visit our support forums. Of course, you can always sign in an try GoodData for free.

GoodData today announced that the Talend Integration Suite is deployed as an integral component of GoodData for Salesforce. Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, enables GoodData to automate the regular collection of data from Salesforce CRM for companies to perform marketing, sales and customer service analytics.

Talend makes data integration a seamless piece of GoodData’s customer analytics offerings, allowing companies to focus on building the reports and dashboards that bring metrics front-and-center in their business, as opposed to solving low-level integration issues.

“Everyone knows that data integration is a critical success factor for SaaS business intelligence,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData founder and CEO. “Talend takes data integration off the table for our Salesforce CRM customers – now they analyze their data in only a few hours.”

GoodData has published its connector on Talend Exchange, providing developers and existing Talend users another easy on-ramp for bringing practically any data into Cloud Business Intelligence. Combining a free open-source integration tool with GoodData’s easy-to-use and free-to-start analytics service removes two major hurdles to business intelligence adoption.

“The open source model clearly provides the highest flexibility and performance for businesses of all types,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend’s vice president and general manager, Americas. “We are happy to see Talend’s leading edge data integration technology being adopted and embedded by SaaS providers such as GoodData to power their offerings, and accelerate their deployment.”

About GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Our Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. It may sound complex, but unlike a lot of business intelligence, Good Data is free to start, simple to use, and costs a lot less than you think. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at http://www.gooddata.com.

About Talend
Talend is the recognized market leader in open source data integration. More than 1,000 paying customers around the globe, including Yahoo!, Virgin Mobile, Sony and Swiss Life, use the Talend Integration Suite of products and services to optimize the costs of data integration, ETL and data quality. With more than seven million lifetime downloads and 1.5 million core product downloads, Talend’s solutions are the most widely used and deployed data integration solutions in the world. The company has major offices in North America, Europe and Asia, and a global network of technical and services partners. For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

Here at GoodData, Customer Analytics is more than a good marketing spin, it’s how we will manage our business. We know that focusing on the metrics that drive our business is the key. Plus, we are inspired by three of our early customers – Enterasys Networks, TriNet and Gazelle – both of which embed analytics (and of course GoodData dashboards) throughout their core businesses. These companies have it in their DNA, from their leaders down to the front line sales, marketing and service folks.

We have come to realize that living the life of a metrics-driven business is deceptively challenging. Even as a startup – without too many people and processes, we are still awash in data and opinions as to which are the ones that really matter. Not to sound too Zen, but I firmly believe that Customer Analytics is about the practice, and not a magic destination or customer insight. After all, despite the promises of BI marketing for generations, metrics don’t make the decisions for you. That’s your job.

l will be blogging about GoodData’s journey to becoming a metrics-driven business as we dig deeper into the practice of customer analytics, throughout 2010 and beyond.

All we need to get going is a vision, some data and a simple plan:

• A Vision: we are fortunate to have a company culture that revolves around data (it helps to be an analytics vendor). We’ve seemingly always had a few GoodData projects with our Google Analytics and product stats in it. But honestly it’s been a back-burner effort as we built the platform and started the business. It took our founder Roman to really kick-start the effort. Look at this report that he created a few weeks back, nothing too fancy, but no one did it until he did. The next day, 4 or 5 other employees started analyzing the same data, and now we’re doing it with more focus and energy. Lesson learned: nothing helps drive a culture around data better leaders being metrics-driven themselves.

GoodData User Trends

• Some Data: even as a startup, we have plenty of customer data. Our mix of customer data comes from our website, our business apps (Salesforce CRM and ZenDesk), and most powerfully GoodData itself. We’ve instrumented our platform to capture the metadata that surrounds our customer interactions. Put into English: we can track when customers engage in our product, what features they use, where they struggle, when they abandon, when they load data, create reports, build dashboards, invite co-workers, and when GoodData becomes viral. That’s a lot of data….

Customer Analytics Data Sources

• A Simple Plan: So much data, so many neat and valuable ways to slice and dice it, let me write up the requirements and get our ops guys to get going on pulling the data in. I already know this will fail. Before I know it, the project will crumble from its own complexity. Sadly, I’ve been in too many Spruce Goose projects before around customer data. Here at GoodData, we are taking our success with agile development [production releases every two weeks] and applying it to customer analytics. So my simple plan is just to define a few sprints and get going.

In my next post I plan to talk a bit more about the simple metrics that matter to us, and talk about the first few sprints that we’ve defined.

Please let me know what you would like to hear about.