Interviews

Interview with GoodData CEO, Roman Stanek

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“I believe it’s not about marketing technology but more about focusing on the critical business problems one is trying to solve and then finding the technology that will allow you to do so. Too often we are focused on technology first vs. business outcomes first”

Tell us about GoodData, embedded analytics and how embedded analytics can make the job of a marketing professional easier.
GoodData is a SaaS company that provides an end-to-end platform that gathers data and user decisions and transforms them into actionable insights delivered within the user’s daily workflow.

Embedded analytics is the term to explain that the insights are ‘embedded’ within the applications in which the user works, such as their CRM system or marketing automation system. Embedded analytics allow professionals to take action based on personalized insights to help them solve business critical problems. Professionals today are bombarded with an overload of information to help them make decisions. But that information is given to them in the form of reports, spreadsheets and static dashboards which means there is no context or suggestions as to what to do with the information. Instead of providing MORE information, we need only the relevant information to the decision at hand, presented in a way that is intuitive and actionable. If marketing professionals received personalized insights within their daily workflow, and those insights included simple, intuitive recommendations and predicted outcomes, marketing professionals could make decisions and take action that would impact their campaigns and ROI in real-time.

Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see embedded analytics impacting the martech market over the next few years?
The martech tools that embed an analytics solution within their tools are the only ones that will succeed. Their customers will demand insights that are so seamlessly integrated into the workflow they won’t even know analytics are running on the backend. Marketers will require the ability to set thresholds for  automated decision making for daily mundane tasks, and those that require thought, investigation or creativity. Because marketers want to test they will require embedded insights within the tools they use so they can do scenario testing and use predictive analytics. These requirements will force martech providers to partner with an end to end  platform that can take care of not only their analytics needs but all data ingestion, governance, security, uptime and visualizations.

What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
Like most, I see a big opportunity with the inclusion of AI and Machine Learning in these tools. The ability to automate daily tasks will free up time for creative and strategic pursuits.

What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
I believe it’s not about marketing technology but more about focusing on the critical business problems one is trying to solve and then finding the technology that will allow you to do so. Too often we are focused on technology first vs. business outcomes first.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
To prepare for an AI-centric world we need to build in time for employees to establish trust with the decisions that are being automated. Set low thresholds and gradually increase them as employees see that the AI algorithms are making the right decisions. Once they know they can trust the decisions, they can focus their energy elsewhere.

What is the core marketing technology capability of your firm that you bring to a marketer? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer life cycle?
The core marketing technology that GoodData brings to a marketer is seamless integration into their daily workflows. With our latest release, GoodData Spectrum, insights are delivered in an intuitive way and provide next best actions to take so a marketer doesn’t have to leave their work environment, look at a static dashboard with a bunch of charts they don’t understand. It’s delivered at the point where a decision needs to be made or an action taken. All the guesswork has been removed.

An example for customer life cycle would be to have an insight delivered that not only suggests an offer to provide to a customer at the appropriate time, but also a button that takes care of sending said offer right then and there. Again, no leaving one tool to go to another to take action.

Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?
We are releasing a new feature in late July which opens up analytics to today’s messy and ambiguous data. Marketers will be thrilled to hear that they can easily manage data like hashtags, sentiment, ‘likes’ on social media and all of that other indeterminate data that can be difficult to classify. It will improve usability and provide a standardization to help support the type of data we are working with today. And they’ll be able to do this themselves; they won’t need to get the IT or development team involved. GoodData continues on our mission to make analytics pervasive and we do that by one, embedding actionable insights into the current workflow and two, removing impediments to getting information where you need and WHEN you need it.

 

 

Roman Stanek is a passionate entrepreneur and industry thought leader with over 20 years of high-tech experience. His latest venture, GoodData, was founded in 2007 with the mission to disrupt the business intelligence space and monetize big data. Prior to GoodData, Roman was Founder and CEO of NetBeans, the leading Java development environment (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999) and Systinet, a leading SOA governance platform (acquired by Mercury Interactive, later Hewlett Packard, in 2006).

GoodData provides an integrated set of data management, analytics, and insight application deployment and management tools as a leader in the Insight Platforms-as-a-Service category. The company supports enterprise-wide data adoption by embedding insights into applications and workflows to provide a full spectrum of data-driven decisions - from transactional to strategic - at the point of work.
More than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 are using GoodData to achieve actionable insights. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Intel Capital, TOTVS, and others. For more information please visit our Website

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