The following guest blog was written by John O’Farrell, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and GoodData investor and board member.

On my Andreessen Horowitz blog, I told the story of how a massive software licensing deal with EDS in 2002 saved our money-losing cloud services company, Loudcloud, and enabled us to start life again as a data center software provider, renamed Opsware. EDS agreed to pay us a total of $52 million in quarterly installments to license our software over three years, ramping up to $20 million a year by Year Three.

What’s less well-known is that, 18 months later (halfway through the contract term), EDS still had not deployed a production instance of our software on any of the tens of thousands of servers for which they were paying us a quarterly subscription fee.

There were many good reasons for this: 1) Our software was not initially suitable for use by anyone other than us. 2) Their big-company inertia. 3) Our focus on signing additional customers. Even so, the inescapable fact was that we had a year-and-a-half to get EDS to use our software in a big way, or we’d lose a $20 million annual revenue stream. As a public company, the disclosure alone that EDS declined to renew would have killed us.

So here is what we did about it:

1. We assigned a dedicated account management team. Comprising top managers and engineers, the team focused on getting our software fully deployed — and used — at EDS.

2. We developed and executed a full plan. We cast a critical eye on everything we needed to do to keep EDS happy — from product changes and deployment tools to training, documentation, connecting with executives and evangelization.

The result is that EDS not only deployed our software, but it also renewed the license in 2005 for another $50 million.

Farmers vs. Hunters.

Back in 2002, a software subscription deal like ours with EDS was highly unusual. All enterprise companies sold their software as one-time perpetual licenses. With no recurring revenue apart from maintenance fees, you had to start from scratch every quarter to keep feeding the revenue engine — but you got paid regardless of whether the customer ever used your software.

By contrast, today’s successful SaaS businesses like GoodData start each quarter with a big chunk of monthly recurring revenue from customers signed in prior quarters. That makes SaaS businesses very attractive to investors once they get that initial recurring revenue flywheel spinning. It also means that getting existing customers fully deployed, as well as keeping them highly satisfied, is absolutely critical. In a SaaS business, churn kills.

While that may sound obvious, losing customers at contract renewal time is the Achilles Heel of many a SaaS startup, for a couple of reasons:

1. Chronology:  The company’s focus in its first year has to be on winning customers.  Renewals, by definition, come later.

2. Incentives:  The company’s board and management often emphasize winning new customers over making existing ones happy — and reward salespeople accordingly.

Some companies choose to address this by compensating their salespeople for renewals and upsells — not just new bookings. While there is some merit to doing this, I don’t see it as a full solution. Getting a customer fully engaged and deriving full value from your product is an ongoing project, not a one-time event like landing a new booking. It demands a different mindset — more of a farmer mentality than a hunter. Most salespeople are hunters. That’s good, since you want your sales team focused on winning new customers to keep the business growing. But it’s not enough.

A better answer is to create a dedicated Account Management function — like we did for EDS — with the accountability for keeping customers happy and renewed, and with the authority to ensure customers’ needs are met.

This goes way beyond technical support. Instead of focusing on the technical weeds, the team concentrates on helping customers achieve business success. That means understanding customers’ use cases, and working with them to ensure the products or services deliver the business value they crave. The best teams also act as ombudsmen — providing access to anyone inside the company who can offer the expertise or insight their customers require.

That mindset practically guarantees 100 percent renewals. But there are additional benefits, as well. These include:

• Giving customers a single point of contact.

• Creating an internal champion for customers by connecting them with the experts they need.

• Uncovering upsell opportunities (expanding use within the current environment) and cross-sell opportunities (finding new opportunities in other customer projects and departments).

• Building a rich set of customer success stories and references.

• Helping manage customer expectations.

• Providing an ongoing feedback loop for the product.

What It All Means

Investing in a dedicated account management function is an investment in customers’ success. GoodData recently made that investment, putting in place a fully staffed account management team under Jonathan Cogan. If you’re a GoodData customer, you can expect regular, consistent business reviews with his team so that they understand your goals and what they need to do to help you get there.

And if you’re an up and coming SaaS company, you need to think about how you can keep those customers you’ve spent so much on to acquire. It’s time to recruit some farmers!

Image Courtesy of Colorado State University

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Yet, Big Data still enters 2013 as a relative toddler. One IDC study estimated that only three percent of the world’s data is tagged, and a mere 0.5 percent of it is being analyzed.

Which developments will advance our limited command over Big Data in the year to come? Four major trends will drive the evolution of Big Data in 2013:

1. The Cloud Will Dominate

My 2013 prediction:  One Fortune 500 company will adopt a “cloud-first” strategy similar to the U.S. Government.

The cloud is maturing with regard to both security and cost. Everywhere you look, from General Electric to NBCUniversal, Comcast, American Red Cross to the US Government and it’s cloud first strategy, major organizations are increasingly placing their proprietary data in the cloud. Large organizations, traditionally more risk-averse adopters of new technology, are comforted by the fact that cloud services are evolving to provide enterprise-level performance and security features.

The inherent costs and limitations of on-premise solutions also render cloud solutions an increasingly attractive alternative. In an era when massive amounts of new data – including mobile, social and geo-locational data – are being generated in the cloud, businesses will sense the futility of accessing and analyzing such data in on-premise systems. Why endure the expense of migrating cloud data to an on-premise system that is ill equipped to host or handle the volume of data generated in the cloud?

Even those who never considered business intelligence (BI) in the cloud will begin facing these types of questions. And as more companies decide the answer is to store, access, and analyze their data in one place, cloud BI will come to be seen as the norm. Considering that one of the greatest tech successes of 2012 was the $637 million IPO of Workday, there’s certainly reason to believe that the tipping point for exponential growth in the cloud sector has arrived.

2. Cloud Infrastructure Will Become Commoditized

My 2013 prediction: A large enterprise software will acquire a Big Data  vendor for $1Billion.

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) spaces are growing crowded with players including Google’s AppEngine, Amazon EC2, SalesForce Heroku, HP Cloud Compute and Windows Azure. As competition heats up, margins will erode. Vendors will train their sights higher up the stack in an effort to gain a competitive edge and lock customers in. The recent launch of Amazon’s Redshift is indicative of this strategy. We expect similar offerings from other vendors in the space.

3. Value will be Driven Further Up the Stack

My 2013 prediction: One obscure company will close an $80M round as the VC community goes into a froth over the predictive analytics space!

As cloud infrastructure becomes commoditized, the value in the Big Data stack will become concentrated in higher layers. Companies that provide layers of abstraction on top of commoditized infrastructure, enabling businesses to analyze data to solve real business problems, will prosper. So while infrastructure providers have generated the bulk of buzz and garnered the most investment dollars to date, we expect to see solution providers, getting more attention from investors and the media in 2013.

In particular, we’ll see rapid expansion in predictive analytics and the AI techniques that are used to make data actionable. Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri goes so far as to predict “algorithm wars” between all the new players that are entering the predictive field. And you can expect venture capital to take notice of the most promising of the warring factions.

4. Data Will Be Pushed Out to Consumers

My 2013 prediction: The Cancun vacation of one SVP of Sales from a major company will be ruined by a text message informing him of his imploding pipeline.

A recent Cisco study projected that by 2016, mobile devices will outnumber people. The growth of mobile has changed the way we view, interact with and process information.

One significant change in mobile this year will be the transformation of business data consumption from a ‘pull’ model to a ‘push’ model. Rather than pull data from the Internet themselves, users will be pushed, or presented with, the data that is most important to them. In the recent past, consumers have grown accustomed to being notified of incoming text messages, emails, upcoming calendar events, and breaking news headlines from the home screen of their smart phones. 2013 will be the year that business users come to rely on home-screen notifications to alert them of major developments within their enterprise.

Big Data is Reaching New Heights

These are exciting times in the Big Data space! If the focus of 2012 was on developing the technologies and infrastructure needed to support a new generation of tools for harnessing Big Data, the emphasis of 2013 will be on the use of these tools to solve business problems.

As affordable and secure cloud BI platforms continue to eclipse on-premise solutions, the number of software solution providers will burgeon to meet the growing demand. Competition amongst cloud providers will be fierce, but will ultimately benefit the consumer – further reinforcing the trend toward high quality cloud BI solutions that provide business value.

The implications are just tremendous. Business users accustomed to sifting through data stored in the clunky on-premise solutions of yesteryear will now rest assured that mobile device push notifications will automatically alert them of any issues that demand their attention. Moreover, as cloud solutions improve and more data becomes available for analysis, enterprises will find new use cases in their data – and new business problems that need to be solved.

The imminent trends of 2013 are clear. Who knows which new heights will be within reach just a year down the road!

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We invited our board member and investor, Larry Bohn from General Catalyst Partners to share his perspective on enterprise software and discuss the biggest trends he sees shaping up this year. Larry believes interest in the enterprise is continuous and compelling given the enterprise software’s ability to generate value for businesses. Read the Q&A to get insight into what we should expect for the enterprise in 2013 and beyond.

We Are in the Middle of a Big Revolution.

Q. General Catalyst has invested in a number of enterprise-focused companies even when the enterprise market was out of favor among venture capitalists. Why did you invest in the enterprise market when most VCs were exclusively chasing consumer investments?

A. Enterprise companies have always tended to be enduring. In Boston, early examples included Lotus, Interleaf, ATG, and Akamai — companies that built good, disruptive technologies that could help businesses become more productive and competitive in their industries.

Companies that create transformative technologies tend to be very enduring. That’s not to say that companies on the consumer side, like Facebook and Twitter, aren’t transformative — it’s just that there are very few of them. But there are a lot more on the enterprise side. In every part of business — from sales to support to manufacture to design — there are handfuls of leading companies that are driving innovation.

Q. What trends do you see that are now, or will soon become important in the enterprise space?

A. The great consumer technologies — from Google Gmail, to Facebook and Twitter  — have set a high bar for how people should interact with software. There’s now an expectation that business software should be self-service; that you should be able to learn it without documentation; and that it should work quickly, work well and be similar to how consumer software operates. That’s made it so companies can adopt a lot more technologies without the concomitant costs of IT groups supporting it. The big trend in IT— whether it’s bring your own device (BYOD) or the cloud— is for the business groups to be self sustaining, and that has lowered the overall costs in delivering advances to companies.

Ten years ago, the IT organization owned the whole stack of  technologies in the data center, and it had all of the control and all of the responsibility to deliver solutions. But today’s forward-thinking CIOs have seen the cloud and SaaS as the opportunity to free up parts of their business, and move more of their systems to an on-demand model using the cloud. But for a variety of reasons — maybe it’s security or regulatory — there are things they aren’t comfortable doing just yet, and that’s why many have set up private clouds. This approach gives them a way to standardize application deployment, management and compliance.  I think it’s a very positive trend and a very disruptive one. It means that a company can follow industry trends rather than having to invent its own, but still have the control they believe they need.

Q. Do you expect VCs to continue to invest in business-focused companies? Or will VCs lose patience given the deeper investments and longer timeframes B2B companies need to gain traction in their markets?

A. I think interest in the enterprise is continuous and compelling. While there has been fascination with the consumer space, many of the consumer-focused startups don’t have much compelling value. And at the end of the day, people pay for value. Investing in the enterprise takes longer, requires significant amounts of capital, and you often don’t see the results of that investment for some time. But if the companies are producing significant technology advantage, business buyers are ready buyers because they can see the value directly in their business.

Q. Common wisdom has always held that large customers don’t want to buy from young companies because of fear the supplier won’t last. How does an enterprise startup overcome that concern?

A. Large companies, like Oracle and IBM, have become distribution systems. Their innovation level is minimal, but their distribution capabilities are enormous. So when customers are looking for innovative technologies, they tend to be more willing to work with startups. One of the results of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has been that even very small companies can service big customers and address worldwide markets. Hubspot, for example, is a small company that addresses a worldwide market of small- to medium-businesses. Fifteen years ago it was hard to get technologies into the hands of those businesses. A customer might have had to spend $1 million to set up Siebel to get only some of the same capabilities Hubspot offers. But today, customers just pay a subscription, and the service is sold in an on-demand model. That’s why we see a lot of enterprise-focused companies selling cost-effectively through a SaaS or cloud model utilizing inbound marketing techniques.

Q. What do you see as the most important trends in the enterprise market?

A. The big trend I see is the dramatic movement of SaaS across business functions. GoodData is a great example. Ten years ago I ran NetGenesis, a leader in the high-end web analytics market. Customers would buy our software, an Oracle database, ETL software and consulting services. It was an erector-set approach that could cost as much as $1 million just to find what your customers are doing. Today you subscribe to GoodData, download customer information into the cloud, and the great user interface lets you start generating reports right away. The time-to-value is a fraction of what it used to be. And because of that— along with the fact that it no longer requires specialized IT expertise —speeds customer adoption.

Q. Are you worried about potential backlash from IT organizations concerned about being disintermediated?

A. IT has moved from being a control organization to a service organization. The revolution has already happened. IT is now focused on providing the right level of infrastructure, networking, bandwidth, the strategic systems that businesses need to own and operate themselves, and the platform to distribute those systems. Businesses are outsourcing many of the applications and functions they formerly controlled, and the ones that are doing a good job of it are seeing massive results.

Q. What problems do you see that beg for solutions? Or have technology companies already solved business issues, and the trend is now one of evolution, rather than revolution?

A. I think we are in the middle of a big revolution around how IT is organized. The cloud is very disruptive and still at a very early stage of adoption. It is fundamental; it is changing what we can do and the methods we use. The new frontier in the cloud is to improve the levels of security, performance, reliability and manageability of the cloud environment.

The other big trend that everyone is feeling is the whole avalanche of big data. Every business has the ability to capture so much data about customers, processes, and operations that just managing and analyzing all that data that is an overwhelming challenge. Innovation in this area is not coming from Oracle or IBM but rather from many early stage companies building new big-data technologies like HBase and Hadoop. These new technologies are providing new platforms for applications that can handle volumes and speeds that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Just like relational databases changed how businesses worked in the 90s, these new technologies are changing the way companies can operate; more efficiently, more competitively, and more globally.

And we’re just getting started. I’m reminded of what Winston Churchill said at the Allied victory of El Alamein: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. “

In other words, this will be a long journey; we can now see how the landscape is forming but  we’re still early in the transformation. The entire world is now wired, and the enterprise market is enormous. It’s an exciting time to be investing in these great B2B companies at a time when some of them can grow to become the pillars of the future economy.

Share your thoughts with Larry and us — what do you think it’s in store next for the enterprise?

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These are just some of the questions anyone will be able to search for using Facebook’s new Graph Search to find anything and everything by extracting data from Facebook’s vast social network. It’s basically a customized database that will let you access specific social recommendations on demand.

I commend Facebook on one of their biggest announcements to date. Graph Search promises to be a long, challenging project that will bring Facebook and Google into an extended battle over the coveted search market. Since the turn of the century, Google has dominated the search space. It’s taken them years of developing complex algorithms to get to the point of successfully monetizing their data. A bevy of other companies, from Microsoft to Yelp, have been trying to capture a piece of the search pie ever since.

Facebook Graph Search has several competitive advantages. Facebook’s 800 million users share a treasure trove of diverse types of data on the website, from brand loyalty to videos. Facebook is also one of the Web’s stickier sites — Americans on average spend 8 hours on the site per month. Facebook could also change the game with its natural language queries. Instead of entering a search string like: {volleyball players-cupcake preferences–children–recipes} and receiving a list of websites that have been ranked by a secret algorithm, you’ll be able to find your answer by simply asking the Graph Search engine: “What kinds of cupcakes do my volleyball player friends eat?” In its final jab at Google, Facebook Graph is using Microsoft’s Bing as a backup search engine for users looking for more generalized information.

Will Facebook’s customized social search be compelling enough to convince people to switch? In terms of monetization, Graph Search is Facebook’s biggest opportunity since mobile. Businesses can use it to learn what people want to buy, as well as which questions people are asking before they make purchasing decisions. Google has long been capitalizing on such “low funnel” prospects via its AdWords ads that appear on the right hand of its search results, but these types of customers are new to Facebook, according to Wired.

Just like Facebook’s IPO, Graph Search will have a ripple effect on the rest of the industry, driving innovation as money continues to pour into monetizing big data. The main question that Facebook has to answer now is will the company be able to customize its big data in a meaningful way? Graph Search can already parse data into a useful context, but can it deliver the right information at the right time? Will it be intelligent enough to become more like a personal assistant than a search engine? Only time will tell.

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1) Identifying Trends

People love to share their opinions on social media, and copiously so.
Social data, collected and analyzed, enables you to derive larger trends about who uses your products, what customers and prospects think about your brand and products, and which larger industry trends are taking place. For example, every day, 300 million tweets are sent out. Twitter makes a large part of its income from selling packages of tweets to companies who use that data to follow national moods on products and stay up-to-date with their brands and competitors.

2) Pinpointing Problems

Social media is like a long, ongoing customer satisfaction survey. What people are saying about your brand on social media is an indicator of the health of your customer base. Who isn’t happy? Why not? Once you have the answers, you can adjust your strategy going forwards.

In addition to getting a pulse on your reputation, you can use big data and social media for quality assurance purposes. Viewing customer complaints and turnaround time at your helpdesk is one example. Another is product-related. Auto manufacturers, for example, are using social media to gauge defects on their cars.

3) Predicting Behavior

Social activity can actually be an indicator of where future profits lie. Next Big Sound, for example, is a company that uses social media to predict record sales. Its platform tracks musicians’ social media fans, the number of plays of their songs, website pageviews, comments and other sources of feedback. This information is then used to identify which bands are popular online before they begin to sell records, as well as larger trends in music consumption. Record companies and studios use this information to target their campaigns and find new bands to sign.

WiseWindow, to name another example, tracks social media sentiment in financial markets. Taken in aggregate, this sentiment can predict industry stock movements, boosting investors’ returns in the process.

Other applications of big data and social media include geolocational technologies, like having your restaurant offer a discount coupon when a prospective customer is nearby, and simplified cross-selling and upselling based on a user’s behavioral patterns. Big data as we know it today may not exclusively depend on social media, but social media is an important component, especially when it comes to understanding customers.

To learn more about how you can turn your social media data into a source of revenue, contact us here. 

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A collaboration between well-known photographer Rick Smolan and author/producer Jennifer Erwitt, “The Human Face of Big Data” contains more than 200 super-sized pages of photos, graphics and essays that show how big data is applied to the world’s problems. (If you haven’t already seen the book, we recommend you get a copy.)

Here are some of stories we found eye-opening in the book:

• Progressive Insurance’s Snapshot, a device that tracks the acceleration, braking, location and distance traveled on teenagers’ cars, with an incentive for reduced insurance;
• Synthetic Genomics, which synthesized an artificial bacterial genome that could eventually replace fossil fuels;
• A “marriage on the rocks” algorithm that is used by credit card companies to predict, with uncanny accuracy, which couples will divorce and when;
• The 860-square-foot surveillance screen used by the public-safety center in Rio de Janeiro;
• Earth Networks, an environmental monitoring firm, can track microclimates with enough precision to pinpoint weather differences in farmers’ fields;
• Scientists have automated the tracking of great apes, using facial recognition and audio recordings to better understand population shifts and ape behavior.

One of the themes of the “Human Face of Big Data” is that as the sensors, mobile devices, geo-locational and other data-collecting technologies grow cheaper, big data will be extending into every facet of our lives. From a business perspective, that means you’ll be able to follow demographic trends in real time, be able to predict the best time of day and location for a sales meeting, be pushed alerts during a meeting that strengthen your position or rapport with clients, among other use cases.

Big data is, as the book implies, like consulting a giant global brain to supplement your own. The only thing left to ask is, are there any limits on what data can do? Will it help us find the right dentist at the right time, cure cancer or avoid war? What is the most important thing that you can see big data doing for us?

Read media coverage on the “Human Face of Big Data” in All Things D, Huffington Post and NPR.

To learn more about GoodData’s big data solutions, request a demo here.

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Five years ago CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, was a hot commodity. People would flock to the annual Las Vegas-based to see and touch the gadgets that promised to revolutionize our lives.

It was the place visitors would go ga-ga over products like the Wii and the Roomba, then have happy hour with some of the biggest names in the tech industry.

Over the past several years, however, CES has transformed into a bland affair. This year seems to reach a new low point: Microsoft, the former CES headliner and keynote purveyor, didn’t even bother to set up a booth. Steve Ballmer made a gratuitous appearance during Qualcomm’s keynote to tout software, particularly Windows Phone 8, but left the rest of the convention to headliners like the window-cleaning robot.

Hardware has Lost its Sex Appeal

Neither Microsoft nor Google, Amazon, or Apple showed a presence at this year’s CES, though they are some of the hottest tech companies in the world. How did hardware go from being so central to our lives to being an accessory?

In recent years, hardware has lost its primacy to software. Most of a user’s computing experience is app-based, online and interactive. Software apps are generally cloud-based and available across devices and platforms. Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all app, developers iterate and perfect apps over time. Frequent, cross-platform upgrades are the result. Siloed hardware-specific applications don’t play much of a role in this new environment. And because apps live in the App Store, they don’t have to be flown into Las Vegas to be placed on display.

If CES is Boring, Where’s the Excitement?

We’ve established that software is hot, and that the app store may have become today’s online version of what CES used to be. But software is a catch-all phrase. Which area do we have to visit to find the real froth?

Enterprise software is the current ‘it’ factor from both an evolutionary and investment standpoint. Everything from business intelligence to wholesale procurement is finding its way onto the cloud, upending the pricey and cumbersome in-house systems that businesses have used for decades. The trend gained traction at the end of last year, when the biggest IPO of Q4 2012, that of cloud-based HR service Workday, was in enterprise software. In the coming year, we expect to see even more exciting offerings in the enterprise software space.

Meanwhile, even some of the biggest names at CES, including Mark Cuban, LG executive James Fishler and Sprint’s Fared Adib, agreed during a panel that “software and user interfaces were replacing hardware as the most innovative areas of technology,” according to CNET’s Andrew Nusca. The network, he writes, matters more than the hardware.

If the big cheese at CES is calling out the ailing significance of hardware, then the convention is truly falling short of its intended purpose. Perhaps next year’s CES should be re-named the Consumer and Enterprise Software — with hardware as the sideshow.

See related blog,  Redefining the Enterprise App by our partner Coupa.

To learn how GoodData can help your organization turn data into dollars contact us here.

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Yesterday, I nearly drowned in a sea of extraneous data. In just one hour during an important conference call, my laptop overflowed with 300 e-mails from an email thread I frankly didn’t care about. Imagine how much time I could have saved if my system knew I was unavailable, and sent me only the two notifications I truly needed: That the customer I was on the call with owed us an invoice, and that my next appointment was delayed by half an hour.

Clearly, enterprise users need an easy and intuitive way to parse all their data into a useful context. Just as clearly, they also need to have the right information delivered to them at the right time, on the right device. These days, that device is likely to be mobile — be it laptop, smartphone or tablet — as sales of desktop computers erode and enterprises increasingly accommodate tablets in the workplace..

I say it’s time for big data to play a starring role on the small screen — the small screen of mobile devices, that is. Businesses primarily view big data as collecting and storing zetabytes of data from diverse sources for eventual business analysis. But in today’s connected and mobile world, decision-makers can’t wait for “eventual.” They need big data apps that intelligently gather and analyze data as it comes in from other apps on their device (your calendar and sales management apps, for instance).  Think of the ramifications: big data apps could suggest different ways to improve sales or — dare I say it — know not to send me thousands of emails on topics I don’t care about when my calendar shows I’m in a meeting.

Such contextual real-time analytics can be extended across any number of roles and tasks: A sales rep driving to one meeting could be alerted that a good prospect two blocks away wants to meet. A Chief Marketing Officer could see which social media campaigns deliver the best return on investment.  Or an inventory manager could know which store just sold out of fashion’s “It” purse and needs immediate replenishment. These are just examples. The convergence of big data and enterprise mobile apps means that anyone, anywhere, can glean the insight she needs to make better, faster decisions.

Think Like a Consumer

The key is in the design. Developers building mobile apps for the enterprise need to combine the ease of use of consumer apps with enterprise-class security and data-collection technologies. And they need to optimize their apps for each device’s small screen.

Consider Intuit’s Mint, which organizes and analyzes consumers’ finances. The company’s desktop, tablet and smartphone apps are all designed to maximize both screen real estate and context. On the desktop app, you can manage and sort your finances in full detail. Mint’s tablet app is smaller and more limited, enabling you to see a list of accounts, but not interact with them in the same depth. Its smartphone app focuses on notifications. Imagine how much could get done if businesses designed their big data apps this way.

In healthcare, for example, doctors making bedside rounds could tap into mountains of clinical research to discover the optimum treatments for their patients — and they could see the results as instantly intuitive charts or as scrollable lists (similar to the iPhone’s email app) depending on whether they’re carrying tablets or smartphones.

In IT, big data apps could predict cyber-attacks and send alerts, show scenarios and recommend actions depending on which mobile device technologists are carrying.

These are just examples, but I firmly believe that big data will soon permeate every aspect of business. I also believe that the convergence of contextual, real-time, data with mobile devices makes everyone and everything smarter. When you look at it that way, the small screen becomes huge.

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How GoodData Can Cure Your Mobility Headaches

Bring your own device (BYOD) has undoubtedly liberated us from the ‘tyranny’ of company-chosen devices. However, it can feel like a dysfunctional family dinner. On a single company network, administrators have to manage a chaotic array of devices and usage patterns. People in one department might talk on their phones all day and night, exceeding their allotted minutes, while another group doesn’t talk at all, but texts all the time. It’s hard to keep your wireless spending under control with so many things going on at once.

Wireless optimization and enterprise mobility management are more complicated than ever. A big part of the solution involves organizing and customizing data coming from the network in a way that’s understandable. With the right data, presented in the right way, companies can optimize their people and processes, regaining control of their mobility.

Understanding the Big Picture

At Advantix Solutions Group, we harness GoodData to offer our users visibility into their entire wireless network and mobility system. With oversight, users can pinpoint and adjust key facets of their network, including:

• Overall trends: What do an organization’s year-over-year usage patterns look like? How about month-over-month? How much would another provider have charged over the same period of time? Are there seasonal spikes? GoodData helps our customers identify all kinds of usage trends, so that they can better understand their network’s user behavior.

• Mobility inventory: GoodData Bashes and report filters enable enterprises to drill down into device owner and device type, finding trends in their organization’s overall usage. Armed with that data, businesses can figure out which new technologies, mobile operating system or wireless carrier to use.

• Total spend: Establishing spend on just one device can be a headache. It’s one thing to look at the top page of the bill and see “Total Current Charges Due,” but it’s another thing entirely to understand the individual costs that make up that amount. (Most people have to consult a telecom expert to get a real explanation.) Now multiply that problem by thousands of devices across multiple locations and project sites. GoodData helps companies understand how much they’re spending, on aggregate, on which kinds of charges. That, in turn, helps businesses make smarter decisions in terms of contracts and carriers.

• Zero-use devices: Many companies have devices that are no longer in use, but that are still being charged a monthly recurring fee. Identifying these devices helps businesses save money, as well as establish a better inventory management process. For example, an enterprise no longer has to order new phones if they already have zero-use devices that can be deployed to an active mobile user.

Pegging Individual Problems

If a few isolated problems are driving up mobile costs, GoodData can help companies play detective and weed the issues out. Here are a few of the common things that could be behind high costs:

• Top 10 users: Who are the company’s top 10 “Hall of Fame” users, the ones who regularly cost the least in terms of texting, voice and data fees? Who’s in the “Hall of Shame”? With GoodData, enterprises can quickly identify key users across different metrics. Along with uncovering trends, companies can establish which departments are over or under-utilizing the tools provided — and why they’re doing it.

• Exception reporting: By loading your billing data into GoodData, you can pull out exceptions to your average usage, such as mobile users who are exceeding a certain threshold of roaming charges, international spending, data overages and the like over a period of time.

With the right information at hand, companies can optimize their wireless infrastructure so that they spend within budget for the features their users demand. The same approach can be used to improve case management or ticketing systems, to better understand caseload and types, peg problem users and find out whether a company is hitting its SLAs or not.

GoodData has been instrumental in helping our users optimize their resources, processes and tools. For Advantix Solutions Group, partnering with GoodData has made it easier than ever to offer solutions for untangling the administrative complications created by the consumerization of IT.

To learn more about how Advantix partnered with GoodData to gain competitive advantage, read the full case study.
To join GoodData’s partner program, find out more here.

Christina Lipton serves as the Marketing Director at Advantix Solutions Group. She has enjoyed a diverse career spanning both sales management and marketing leadership, always holding to her personal motto: “strive for excellence”. Prior to her tenure with Advantix she owned a successful boutique marketing consulting firm that focused on helping emerging companies achieve huge results.

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What’s an application? The answer to this question would many times depends on who you ask.

If you asked a company that uses legacy apps, the answer would go along these lines. An app is something that you buy based on its features. You spend a long time installing it, maybe years. Once it’s up and running, you have to upgrade or patch the software every so often, another huge resource burden.

On the other hand, if you asked my teenage son what an app is, he’d give you a very different answer. For him, an app is something he pays about $1 for, downloads from the Internet or on his iPhone, uses for two weeks and then probably deletes.

Designed for the End User

My son is part of the generation that companies are hiring right now. People in his age group text and use social media apps like Facebook every single day. They’re used to mobile, intuitive apps. Cumbersome legacy apps simply won’t get used.

Enterprise software today must be designed for the end user. The new enterprise software app should be something that people are delighted to use. That user friendliness benefits the business as well, because the more people use the app, the more that app benefits productivity across the board.

We’ve found this to be the case at Coupa. Our software simplifies and streamlines every facet of the procurement cycle, from negotiating deals to managing expense reports. As a result, end users spend more responsibly and within the terms of their contract.

Coming Out of the Cloud

The new class of enterprise apps is built using mobile-friendly, lightweight languages. We like Ruby on Rails, which enables a fast development cycle. It’s easy to install and update. Moreover, instead of plunking down our product in front of customers and letting them figure out how to use it, we’re constantly improving our apps based on customer feedback.

Like many cloud-based providers, we’ve found that our customers’ needs are constantly growing and changing. That’s why we push out more than 65 different features every quarter. Our ultimate focus is on customer success. We’re judged on our ability to provide a quality service. If we don’t have 100% customer success at the end of the year, our customers won’t renew their subscriptions.

Empowered by Analytics

Another key feature of today’s cloud-based enterprise apps is that they enable users to gain visibility. Workers and customers can share information over the cloud. We use GoodData to enable our users to benchmark their workers, so that they can see who’s doing what, and compare each individual’s results.

These analytics are huge to our customers, because they enable those customers to optimize their spending, improve their operations, make better decisions and reduce costs. Rather than sitting unused, our customers can put an analytic mindset on their data and yield more results. That takes spend management from being an unstructured, onerous process to a cloud-based, analytical one. It’s absolutely huge.

Tools for the Next Generation

Enterprise apps are being redefined. They’re becoming user-friendly, analytical and responsive tools. At Coupa, we’re proud to build a cloud-based app that truly gets used, enabling the next generation of business leaders to spend responsibly.

Tony Wessels is currently the Vice President of Marketing at Coupa. Prior to joining Coupa, Tony managed a worldwide marketing team at EMC and supervised the development of all EMC corporate campaigns, including its recent cloud campaign strategy. Before EMC, Tony was the Vice President of Marketing for APTARE, a storage resource management software company. As a key member of the executive team, Tony’s marketing efforts drove revenue growth over 100% YOY. Prior to APTARE, He was the Vice President of Marketing at Stata Labs, a provider of search-based email solutions, where he led all aspects of marketing and was instrumental in the company’s acquisition by Yahoo! Inc.

Tony holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Texas at Dallas.

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