Roman Stanek

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 economics, reality always catches up. We’re seeing one after another SaaS BI startup to go out of business. Back in June it was LucidEra and earlier this week Blink Logic ceased operations. But anybody who only briefly looked at Blink Logic’s finances (it was a public company) shouldn’t be surprised by this event. Why do so many of the attempts to marry BI and SaaS fail? The problem is that Saas BI sounds simple … simple enough to take an existing BI asset (integration engine, open source analytical ... (more)

Please Don’t Let the Cloud Ruin SaaS

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 operations. We collected all the cash upfront, took another 25% in annual maintenance. Throwing software over the wal... (more)

COSS BI: Open Source, Open Core or Openly Naked?

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 COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure jus... (more)

TDWI: Independence vs. Cash

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 of independence left... ... (more)

Will Moore’s Law Find It’s Way to the Cloud?

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% drop of EC2 prices. The price of the small Linux instance was constant at $0.10 per hour for the last two years... (more)