GoodData BI customers now able to use data on Amazon Redshift

Users of the GoodData BI platform will now be able to store their data in Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse powered by Amazon Web Services.

GoodData revealed the partnership agreement on Tuesday.

As more and more organizations move their business intelligence operation to the cloud, the partnership will give users of the GoodData BI platform another option to store and access their data whenever needed. GoodData, founded in 2007 and based in San Francisco, previously formed partnership agreements with other leading cloud data warehouse providers including Snowflake, Google for its BigQuery platform and Microsoft.

"Pretty much everybody is migrating to the cloud, so data management and data warehousing, in particular, are [critical]," said Zdenek Svoboda, co-founder of GoodData. "The largest number of customers -- or companies -- are moving from on-premises data warehouses to Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and other cloud options. That's our big motivation."

The GoodData BI platform is a cloud-based service, so providing users the ability to use the cloud data warehouse of their choice is important for any BI vendor.

GoodData has its own data warehouse, but the vendor's agreement with Redshift provides its customers one more option when deciding where to store and manage their data.

"Overall, it presents a great opportunity for customers looking to leverage cloud and analytics for their data warehouse," said Tim Crawford, strategic advisor at AVOA, a consulting firm based in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif. "Redshift is growing in popularity, and building a strong analytics platform on top of Redshift provides great opportunities while harnessing the horsepower of the AWS underpinnings."

Beyond providing customers of the GoodData BI platform an extra option, the vendor's partnership agreement with Redshift is one more step in the attempt to address the larger issue of helping organizations efficiently use their data in ways traditional warehouses -- data warehouses that aren't based in the cloud -- can't.

Overall, it presents a great opportunity for customers looking to leverage cloud and analytics for their data warehouse. Redshift is growing in popularity, and building a strong analytics platform on top of Redshift provides great opportunities while harnessing the horsepower of the AWS underpinnings.

"The challenge for companies is in how they leverage their data," Crawford said. "There are two dimensions to that -- one is where the data resides. As more data, over time, is produced and stored in cloud, cloud-based solutions will grow in popularity. Second, companies are looking for ways to leverage the data where it resides, which creates challenges to a traditional data warehouse approach."

Similarly, Svoboda noted the importance of giving GoodData BI customers access to data wherever it resides.

"We need to distribute the data from the centralized systems -- wherever the data are stored -- and make sure that it is widespread data distribution [and] is executed in real-time," he said.

While the partnership is beneficial to users of the GoodData BI platform, it's also beneficial -- and perhaps even necessary -- to GoodData itself given that Redshift is one of the most popular cloud data warehouses and other BI vendors already have partnership agreements in place for their users to store their data in Redshift.

"GoodData is leveraging AWS Redshift as a data warehouse platform option within the product for companies that have standardized on Redshift as their data warehouse," said Rita Sallam, analyst at Gartner. "Most analytics and BI platforms have partnerships with Amazon Redshift in some form or another as it has become an increasingly important data warehouse platform."

In addition to the basics of the partnership agreement between GoodData and Redshift, an additional aspect is a pricing model designed to encourage onboarding of new customers and other independent software vendors.

According to GoodData, enterprises and vendors using the GoodData BI platform can start working with Redshift for free with up to five customers in order to validate their analytics prototypes. They can then pay as they grow.