Roman Stanek

Twitter’s latest iteration of its site is great, but  it’s abundantly clear that the newly dumbed down design is aimed exclusively at the consumer.  But what about the enterprise?  Does the new Twitter design mean that ultimately, there will be a second conception of the beloved ... (more)

The days of developing enterprise applications wherein the User Interface is an afterthought are rapidly coming to an end, and enterprise software companies had better adjust. Steve Jobs and Apple started the shift, and while Apple’s products were oriented toward the consumer, th... (more)

GoodData announced earlier today a $15M B-round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.   Mark, Ben and the rest of the team have managed to quickly build one of Sand Hill’s leading venture capital firms, but their influence is felt well beyond Silicon Valley. Like a lot of ent... (more)

When the PC industry was young we used to build computers from build-it-yourself computer kits. The best known kit was the Altair 8800 but another was actually called SOL (maybe due to the condition in which kit purchasers/PC hobbyists would find themselves…). Nobody buys and b... (more)

Winston Churchill once said that “difficulties mastered are opportunities won”. His quote is very applicable to the the effort of building BI in the cloud. GoodData announced earlier today that May 2011 was our biggest month ever, so it is good time to look at difficulties and op... (more)

Andrew Jassy SVP, Amazon Web Services Hi Andy, I am not going to ask you how are you doing. For everyone in the Amazon Web Services eco-system, the last 24 hours have been brutal. But I’d like to share my perspective with you, and offer a couple of suggestions: I believe that in... (more)

To put it simply, I am in the business of building platforms. NetBeans was the first extensible Java IDE platform with plug-ins back in 1999. Systinet had a product that was actually called Web Application & Services Platform (WASP). But both NetBeans and Systinet were “only” what... (more)

“When you open BI to the masses, people get a taste of what they can do and start demanding more and more information and analytics” Dan Vesset, IDC analyst, Computerworld, June 21, 2004 “Let them eat cake”.Marie Antoinette, Versailles, 1789 I’ve always found the BI industry’s fa... (more)

Cloud Expo Europe The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is my favorite business book – its main idea (disruptive technologies serve new customer groups and “low-end” markets first) was the guiding principle of all my startups. The best part is that even though everybod... (more)

GoodData Session at Cloud Expo September 24, 2009 - Terry Pratchett once wrote that “Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off”. We could make a similar comment about the financials of SaaS BI companies. As much as startups in this field would like to shake off their bad econo... (more)

BI on Ulitzer Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure of Commercial Open Source Software.” Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued. I believe that the C... (more)

BI on Ulitzer A long time ago I came to the conclusion that “independent industry analyst” was an oxymoron. But the willingness to sell independence for cash reached a new low with TDWI’s New SaaS Business Intelligence Portal. Please visit the link and see if there is any trace ... (more)

Moore’s Law states that computer system performance/price ratio will double every two years. And that was very much my expectation when Good Data started using Amazon Web Services almost 2 years ago. But I had to wait until today to see Moore’s Law at work: Amazon announced 15% d... (more)

SaaS Journal on Ulitzer Back in the old good days of enterprise software, we did not need to worry about our customers. We delivered bits on DVDs – it was up to the customers to struggle with installation, integration, management, customization and other aspects of software opera... (more)

I am not happy to see LucidEra disappearing. It is not a good sign for the SaaS BI market in general and the startups in our space specifically. And I still believe Rob Ashe (IBM/Cognos) was wrong when he said that “BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS”. There are some fundamental dif... (more)

It’s not a shock to state that cloud computing will disrupt the business model of commercial software. But how it will affect the open source movement? The rise of open source is clearly linked to the rise of the web. Buy a commodity piece of hardware, download source code of an... (more)

I spoke at the first Cloud Computing Expo Europe and I enjoyed the conference very much. Here is my presentation: PS. This presentation was featured today as one of the Top Presentations of the Day by Slideshare… Tagged: Cloud Computing Expo keynote, Europe ... (more)

Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want eco... (more)

No other major SaaS company in the world could get away with this approach to paying customers. Not only Google offers no user-friendly tools to add shared contact to the paid version of Google Apps. They offer no tools. Period. Here is the only information available to email admi... (more)

Elasticity of the cloud computing is a wonderful idea. You can get an instance of networked computer exactly when you need it and you only pay for the time when you actually use it. But while the virtual memory and hard disk is a “clean slate” created specifically for you, the IP... (more)