Link: http://www.gooddata.com

A new startup funded in part by Marc Andreeson (formely of Netscape & Mosaic fame) called Good Data extolls the virtues of collaborative Business Intelligence and placing the platform on cloud computing environment for scaleability as usage grows. It leverages SOA and Web 2.0 technology to deliver a hosted solution that is as functional, if not more so, than pre-existing BI platforms like OBIEE, Business Objects, Cognos, etc. And best of all, it's free to try!

I have yet to play around with this but I'll be taking a CSV file of raw data and trying to build reports on top of it, including the testing of Ad Hoc analytics on it. With Good Data, you can source multiple data sets, including Amazon S3 buckets. It's claim to access different data sets via their API needs to be tested out but the limitations are obvious if a database was the source of data that needs to be transferred over the Internet (securely of course) into Good Data's distributed system. I'm guessing Hadoop is their storage and processing model for distributing the share of workload for storage, retrieval and light processing of the data.

It will be interesting to see how this new upstart plans to break a market that has been previously dominated by a handful of BI players. And given the hosted model here, how long will we see this being produced as a standalone enterprise application that can be purchased by customers looking to manage their BI internally? Financial institutions would NOT want a hosted solution for this and they are a market that would be good to monetize on. What plans Good Data has is not clear but hopefully they sort this out and pick their target markets wisely.