Intense Competition in Data Analytics Space
by Avin Jain
Published: Apr 16, 2024
Published: Apr 16, 2024
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The above paragraph is befitting to the Data Analytics - Platforms, Solutions, and Service space & BDB (https://www.bdb.ai).
BDB is a unified Data Analytics Platform that provides Data Ingestion, Data Preparation, Data Catalog, Data Lineage, Data Pipeline, ETL/ELT, Data Management, Data Science, Notebook, Data Visualisation (Self Service + Governed Dashboard), Mobility on any Cloud, On-Premise, Hybrid environments using any Standard Data lake (Snowflake, AWS S3, Azure, BigQuery, Oracle, Mongo (any flavor), ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, etc.)
The platform is built by a team (which has previously spent a decade in Business Objects R&D) by investing a Decade, without External Investments from any funds.
D&A Platform is an extremely crowded place and I come across a new platform every month, yet according to me not more than 5 Platforms are proper D&A Platforms that can stand the 'Test' of a Complex Workflow to be built. I consider BDB to be one of these 5. Now building such kind of platform without investments that gives seamless analytics which is easy to learn, deploy & maintain is a key differentiation. BDB has a presence in the USA and UAE with a core team based out of India. If given a fair chance of POC, BDB can be extremely competitive. Be it feature, price, or timelines, BDB wins the POCs for enterprises most of the time!
Almost every large enterprise in the world has built a customized Platform for end-to-end data Analytics, but they are using either AWS/ Azure/ GCP/ Salesforce or Databricks where Developers are in complete Control. Most of these platforms are 4-10 Years old with extremely high maintenance (running) costs and they generally use a standard Visualization tool. They sometimes keep buying different tools for Data Catalog, Metadata Management, and Data lakes to build their solution around Open Source Technology on the Cloud. Most engineering teams are 3x-5x of the size that they should have been & spend very high Cloud bills, but BDB kind of platforms were not available earlier. Today’s organizations will use BDB kind of platform to build Integrated Analytics much faster (1/3 of Time and 1/3 of Cost).
(see Intense Competition Section in this article).
This is natural, who will accept a new platform that easily? But this will change in a few years. 5 years back even our partners were not ready to use the BDB platform but today some partners have picked it and they have built their solutions. Their customers are happy and in fact, some have won against competition by white labelling the BDB platform.The success ensures the adoption.
We have trained some Developers in BDB and then asked them to try Azure or AWS, even though they picked these platforms quickly still they like developing in BDB as it is more integrated and one can see Self Service Visualization of any Data Engineering activity being done to validate the data and requirements. Once the customer can visualize their data, they can close the design faster.
The Platform decisions should be in the hands of Management and not developers. It’s the economics of the company that is more important, developers will keep moving across the industry. The companies that leave the decision on developers eventually land in overspending. I have seen the technical leadership of any company like BDB as they can reduce their cloud bills and achieve the functionality expected by their business teams.
BDB has developed very strong Training Content in 10+ different verticals with realistic sample data, problem statements, videos, practice environments, etc. and we have seen its effectiveness in training hundreds of people in the last 5 years. We should now train thousands of people in the next 5 years!
BDB is 9 years old, the first question someone asks me is how much investment you have got. This is a natural question since we have invested 50-60 people for almost a decade in building, maintaining & enhancing the platform. The process never stops, most people understand this very well and quite a few have tried building platforms in their careers.
My answer is, “No investment from Investors”. I have got some money as appreciation from known Technical Folks who are my old colleagues and friends. 98% of BDB Stocks are with BDB Employees!
There was so much pressure on us to try for Investment and it was projected that if we don’t take investment then neither we can make a competitive product nor we can survive.
I believe that NOT having an investment for a platform company is tough for the first 10 years, but after a decade, it can become THE BIGGEST STRENGTH especially if your platform can beat any other platform in functionality. I know 99% of people will not agree with me but in a year, BDB gets the comfort of execution and choice. The partner community will have more confidence in BDB & it should get ready for IPO before 2028. With ARRs increasing and partners blessing BDB with more contracts, its weakness can become its strength. No one should be able to win against us on Pricing (if we want to win that contract).
Platform, Solution, and Services – all are directly possible from BDB.
We want to grow with internal references and by making our partners successful. We are even building solutions for our partners so they to win more business.
BDB is not in the business of developing LLMs but we have used them effectively in our platform, we can integrate with any LLM and we have integrated their workflow into our UI without charging any License. One can see our Gen AI Videos to see the overall offering. We have made it so simple for our customers that they don’t have to worry about so much noise on Gen AI upgrades. The best of the solutions can be provided by BDB in a way, that customers can optimally create their workflows, they won’t be left behind and they won’t overspend.
The Data Pipeline module with custom coding features is the Backbone of the BDB platform. The kind of training that we provide to our Data Engineers is the best in the industry. We have seen our trained data engineers can pick up AWS and Azure-based data pipelines in a couple of weeks and deliver better than others. This gives us a chance to suggest to customers the benefits of the BDB platform. Our data engineers have exposure to work in multiple domains and multiple complex problems to handle big data from varied data sources.
BDB is registered as OEM in the GeM (Govt E-Marketplace) Portal in India and a few months back we thought of building a proposal for a leading PSU of India that required a solution on AWS. They were open for any platform or Custom Code on AWS. Most companies prefer custom code via developers on AWS. We did a complete estimation and we are comfortable in doing the entire contract for 9 m$ meeting all their terms of Security, etc. After a couple of months, we checked the actual bid amount in GeM. The best proposal was 20m$ and max. bid was of 33 m$! Now most people will ignore and say BDB does not have that kind of maturity, domain specialists... We have delivered much bigger and more complex projects than this one. In a few years, we will break the threshold of minimum turnover qualification and at that point, there will be intense Competition from BDB. We will start working on making partners who can use our platform in the Indian ecosystem and deliver effectively. It won’t take long when Technical Leadership in PSUs, and governments will observe the quality and capability of the BDB Platform.
For Western Clients, and Fortune 500 Clients, I hear that they don’t care for money and they will never sign with a small company like BDB. Well, directly or indirectly we have worked with 10 Fortune 500 and 3 Fortune 50. In all cases(100%), where I have interacted with Fortune 500, and if they allowed us to do a POC for them, we have been able to sign the deals – Directly or via Partners. Any great Technical Leader will find the BDBs proposition exciting as they understand what it brings to the table and they are not scared like Commercial Leaders who don’t understand the data analytics engineering process. They always believe in the saying’ One doesn’t get fired for choosing IBM’, well times have changed. Unless you can use the start-up ecosystem and make bold decisions, you can never make that kind of mark for the company. The need of the hour is to reduce cloud bills, create CDPs, and go for Data Monetisation. For all of the above, there is no equivalent to BDB.
One of the biggest brands in India is partnering with BDB and soon will be launching multiple solutions for the SMB sector. There is another Japanese partner who has chosen BDB for their larger PSU contracts. One partner has white-labeled the solution in the telecom space and signed with multiple customers. One partner has built Workforce analytics and is in the process of signing large deals. BDB works from behind and can lift all kinds of partners. Some of them can understand our value, some may not be fully aware of D&A complexities.
It has not been easy to make such partners who are ready to take the technology of a company 1/50x of them. This requires a great mindset and only progressive technical leaders can decide against the tide.
In 2018 we started making partners, it took almost 5 years to establish 2 partners and
I see more solution-based partnerships happening in the next 3 years. Next year our version 10 will be released and we are going to bring top-end observability features with intuitive UX.
The investment brings intense pressure, it increases your horizon, and your reach but it brings the pressure of first scaling the numbers and then increasing the profits. In the first stage, it is very easy to compete with a company like BDB but in the second stage, it’s difficult to compete as we will give reverse competition. One never knows when the investment money will deplete and the company will get under intense pressure. My experience of Business Objects of a decade taught me a lot & I can predict the moves of most companies and I am clear on which companies will get sold in the next 3 years in this space. The pressure of profits is mounting on many, their support is weak, wages are increasing, there is an intense movement of people between similar types of companies, and delivery is no 1 issue.
Most people ask me, if you don’t make investments you won’t be able to survive, You won’t be able to grow, and people will leave the Org for better wages. There is a certain merit in the argument and we have seen turbulent times. But investment doesn’t guarantee the stability of business. If you have an investor who has not understood the business flow and invested, they will always create trouble for you. Whether you are invested or not invested, it doesn’t matter, esp. when you are 9-10 yrs. Old company and you have achieved Product maturity and built certain kinds of customers and partners. Don’t waste money in areas that don’t give value to your customers. We have always put our extra penny into the product. That R&D mindset has helped us in developing the platform and now business mindset will help us in scaling it organically.
As I said, the issue is the deliveries, in most contracts customers are not ready to give data till the last moment, and there are constant changes in the scope, data patterns, and data sources that using a standard Cloud platform results in creating multiple small deployments for developers that results into 50-100 $ daily cloud bill per developer. I have seen some large customer spending xxx m$ per annum on cloud bills for Data Analytics! Some even think of using BDB at the Dev level and try to save a few million dollars.
Some customers have very small use cases but they want full deployment of the platform (private version) which makes the implementation costly.
I still see very few customers in India are ready for Cloud-based SaaS and are still on Excel and Excel-based analytics. To gain the benefits of Gen AI, most companies will have to use Data Engineering Practices and clean their data. Remember Garbage IN, Garbage OUT, therefore the need for BDB kind of platforms will be ever-increasing.
With a 50-70% ARR increase from existing customers & partners, we should be able to survive and grow. In the next 1 year, our weakness should turn out to be a strength when we have our 10.0 version and growth potential of 100% y-o-y. When we read large RFPs on Data, we can see 95%+ features in BDB. It will get exciting as more and more Data Professionals will start trying BDB either directly or via training institutes and universities.
If you want to try BDB, it's not Free, but you can try for less than a resource cost execute multiple use cases and check out the TCO.