Ray has entered blogosphere!

Ray Light, the guy who sits next to me in Good Data has started blogging. I know that he will be damn good at it. You can start following him at http://www.collaborativeanalytics.com/.

Cloud Transparency

Radovan wrote a comment on Werner's article about cloud transparency. I agree that operators need monitoring and developers want to optimize their apps. However I don't understand how these needs relate to (location) transparency. I think that this is rather about functionality (e.g. OOTB performance and right management tools) that the cloud offers.

I see a little schizophrenia in the AWS messaging. "We (AWS) want developers to play with all nuts and bolts, optimize, monitor, and trace at the network packet level. And when the code jumps into our queuing, simple db, payment or whatever other high-level service then forget all transparency, close your eyes and cross your fingers." :-)

I think that different developers have different needs in terms of the right transparency level. IMO AWS is heavily used by web developers. I believe that particularly web developers will lean towards higher transparency, packaged high-level services and easy deployment.

Radovan, what do you think about the Google AppEngine?

Ema & Anna

Erika gave birth to Ema and Anna last Thursday. You can see few very bad quality (iPhone) photos of our newborns on my Flickr.

The Good Data Public Beta is Out!

Go to or website and sign up. And please remember, that we would love to hear from you via our GetSatisfaction forum. Please let us know what you think and help us to create vital community around our product. Thanks!

Good Data Beta is Close!

I just noticed this article. The UI screenshots are a bit outdated. Yep, 3 months are deep history in SaaS. :-)

Stay tuned, we are close to our first public beta release. Hopefully we will release the public beta next week. If you can't wait and promise me tons of feedback, let me know at zd at gooddata.com. Perhaps I can let you in sooner ;-)

Does SAAS-BI make sense?

I recently came across this interesting article on the poeticcode blog. In short, it's author claims that BI as service (SAAS-BI) does not make sense because of the difficulties with incremental data loading and higher network bandwidth requirements.

I do not want to dispute here the difficulty of the incremental data warehouse loading. It is difficult in certain situations. It is not that difficult in others where the nature of data help solving it in elegant ways. Moreover the incremental loads are necessary for many BI applications no matter if these are deployed in house or as a hosted service. This integration "baseline" (from the labor and cost standpoint) is the same for both in-house and SAAS. SAAS then removes the labor and costs associated with the data warehouse and analytical stack implementation/maintenance. The multi-tenancy leads to improved HW utilization. Only these two factors lead to huge savings and far better return of investment.

The Internet network connection bandwidth argument is ridiculous: "Not to mention, all the extra network bandwidth needed to encrypt and transfer the data from your data center to the SAAS-BI data center. That also means factoring your internet pipes for much more peak-bandwidth else your potential customers visiting your corporate website might have network problems and worse, you might lose sales and loyal customers."

This argument does not even apply to my naively and quickly implemented FAN (Family Area Network). :-)

Summary: It is certainly good to know about the data integration issues associated with the (SAAS) BI. You should not overlook them. However, I do not believe that these issues are the key decision points like cost of ownership, risk management, return on investment, implementation time etc.

Gooddata Architecture

Take a look at the Gooddata BI platform architecture here.