Adding support for an AWS product is usually a good idea for 3rd party vendors. Adding a partnership on top of that is even better. GoodData is doing that, and more, on its way to offer analytics to everyone.

GoodData, one of the key players in business intelligence and analytics, announced integration with Amazon Redshift data warehouse solution, as well as a partnership with Amazon. These are significant not just for GoodData, or Amazon, but also as pieces of the puzzle in a shifting landscape, namely business intelligence and analytics.

ZDNet connected with Zdenek Svoboda, GoodData co-founder and VP of Platform, and discussed everything from data connectors to semantic models and from business strategy to how Kubernetes enables predictable pricing.

GoodData has been around since 2007. For a rapidly developing domain like the one GoodData is in, this is a long time. Many players have gone boom and bust, changed hands and fortunes since then. Case in point, the recent acquisitions of Tableau by Salesforce, and Looker by Google. So let’s start by taking the time machine for a quick ride back to 2013.

That was the year we introduced the term Agile Business Intelligence (BI), as part of a research report for Gigaom. A lot has changed since then, including Gigaom, and most of the vendors featured in that report. But not the key premises of Agile BI, or GoodData’s execution on this.

GoodData was among the first to realize that all your data belongs to the cloud and acted upon this. How? By offering its software via the SaaS model, as well as connectors to ingest data from as many sources as possible, including, prominently, cloud storage and other SaaS solutions.

Another direction that GoodData was a trailblazer in was embedded analytics: Enabling customers to include GoodData-powered analytics in their solutions. These things may look like table stakes today, but being an early adopter back then, and executing consistently, is why GoodData is still around and well-positioned.

Today, as Svoboda explained, the move to the cloud among GoodData clients is massive. Svoboda cited research from IDC, according to which cloud is growing at a 20% yearly rate at the expense of the on-premise data centers that are shrinking 5% every year. So GoodData is following the data, and going cloud with Redshift, Amazon’s Data Warehouse:

“We see a lot of customers and prospects who use [Redshift] as their system of record for their internal reporting and analytics. However, when they need to share analytics beyond the perimeter of their organization, to their customers or business partners, they must use a different architecture. GoodData is designed exactly for this use case scenario”.

The idea seems clear: Redshift is great but does not work ideally for all use cases. GoodData lets you extend its capabilities. Win-win, right? Let’s consider data warehouse market trends. According to research shared by Svoboda, Snowflake is leading in terms of spending intentions, with AWS, Microsoft and Google following, and everyone else lagging.

As Svoboda put it, Amazon has the largest market share (> 50%), Microsoft Azure is the fastest-growing, and Google Cloud is investing to catch up — see Looker acquisition. So it makes sense for GoodData to be partnering with Amazon, considering it already supports Snowflake and Google Big Query. Svoboda explained there is a whole range of joint activities with Amazon scheduled around Redshift integration.

How will the integration work? In a way, this is business as usual for GoodData. GoodData already has an extensive line of connectors, enabling it to ingest data from over 150 sources. So it’s just adding one more source. Data integration is the unglamorous layer on which everything else may be built, and Svoboda emphasized the “everything else” part.

Read the full article on ZDNet