2022: The BI Industry in Flux — Reporting Enters Stagnation, Modern BI Rises

The BI Industry in Flux

2022 is a year of transformation for the business intelligence industry. Earlier this year, Gartner released its highly anticipated 2022 China Analytics Platforms report. Over the next five years, IT-oriented reporting BI applications will stagnate, while business-oriented modern BI will rise at a compound annual growth rate of 36.23%, setting the trajectory for the industry's next decade.

2022 also marks the sixth year since Guandata's founding. Guided by its mission to "empower business users, enable smarter decisions," Guandata has worked alongside more than 500 leading customers across industries to define and advance the practice of modern BI. At the recently concluded "Empower Business Users · Guandata 2022 Intelligent Decision Summit and Product Launch" livestream, Guandata founder and CEO Chunyuan Su and co-founder and CTO Jin Zhang shared the company's deep thinking on modern BI, its implementation path, and future roadmap. They officially unveiled the Guandata One-Stop Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0 with its new product capabilities and an upgraded customer success strategy.

Empowering Business Users: Leading Practices in Modern BI

In the traditional BI era — designed for IT and centered on reports — business teams struggled to independently access and analyze data for decision-making. They were heavily dependent on IT, and in most organizations, a vast capability gap separated IT from business. The vast majority of decisions were made in isolation across this divide, drifting further from the essence of data-driven decision-making. In his summit presentation, Guandata founder and CEO Chunyuan Su noted that in today's VUCA era of surging uncertainty, more enterprises need business teams capable of independently using data to make decisions, bridging this gap so that analytical capabilities rest with those closest to and most knowledgeable about the business. Agile decision-making allows companies to seize确定性增长机会 amid uncertainty.

"Empower business users" has been Guandata's founding conviction since day one. Through collaborative practice with leading customers across industries, this philosophy became the industry's new paradigm in 2022. Su articulated how Guandata, guided by this principle, has evolved its product through six years of customer feedback and advanced technology integration. The modern BI product it has built centers on three pillars: ease of use, enterprise-grade capability, and scenario-based design. Built on these foundations, Guandata continues to innovate, enabling business users to adopt the platform quickly, broadly, and actively, helping enterprises develop agile decision-making capabilities, improve data-driven rates, and build competitive advantage through data analytics.

Su emphasized that the "ease of use" of BI that empowers business users means ease of use for business professionals specifically. It is not locked to any single feature but enables end-to-end analytical accessibility for business users. Its design reflects not the subjective preferences of any particular role, industry, or company, but scientific methods distilled from best practices across sectors. Guandata's proprietary "990" product design methodology — enabling 90% of business users to achieve 10x efficiency gains over traditional BI in 90% of typical business scenarios — drives this ease-of-use design. The essence is enabling non-technical business users to get started quickly with minimal barriers.

The "enterprise-grade" pillar points to the "4+1" characteristics required of a platform that empowers business users: one-stop capability, high performance, high stability, high governance, and high extensibility. Its underlying support comes from the platform's cloud-native, big data, and AI-integrated architecture, which provides sustained data-driven momentum as enterprises grow. The essence is enabling broad business adoption.

"Scenario-based design" represents the cutting-edge trend in modern BI for the next 5-10 years. Guandata has pioneered phased exploration of scenario-based capabilities through its application marketplace. As Su put it, "Scenarios are the eyes of data analytics." Data ultimately serves to solve business problems, and the smallest unit of business is the individual scenario. Drawing on years of experience with advanced enterprises, Guandata has deconstructed typical enterprise data analytics scenarios to build content assets, data connectors, component extensions, and intelligent applications, assembling them in a cloud-based application marketplace. This allows companies across industries to rapidly acquire needed analytics capabilities, plug-and-play, and actively put them to use in various analytical scenarios.

Through sustained accumulation and refinement of ease of use, enterprise-grade capability, and scenario-based design, Guandata's modern BI has built the critical capabilities to empower business users. Beyond leading product and technology practice, Guandata has also upgraded its service strategy.

Strategic Upgrade: Customer Success as Guardian

Guandata's commitment to empowering business users extends beyond product innovation. In his summit presentation, Su also unveiled Guandata's upgraded customer success strategy, anchored by the principle that "Guandata's success is defined by our customers' success" — a reflection of the company's determination to help customers empower their business users. Internally, Guandata has elevated customer success to a first-tier department providing long-term, embedded service. The company has also designated the third Friday of each month as "All-Hands Customer Success Day." Regardless of where they are, the CEO, all line leaders, and every frontline customer-facing team member join a 9 a.m. meeting to transparently review key customer feedback, retrospect on critical issues affecting customer and user adoption, and track closure at the company level.

Drawing on successful practices with 500+ advanced customers, Guandata has developed the Customer Success Cycle in Four Steps. Combined with Guandata's modern BI capabilities in ease of use, enterprise-grade performance, and scenario-based design, this enables continuous "diagnosis-planning-enablement-feedback" cycles at different stages of enterprise data analytics capability building, genuinely assisting customers in empowering their business users.

Beyond iterating its existing service system, Guandata launched a series of distinctive services in 2022 to ensure long-term customer success. The first is analyst training and operations for business teams. Guandata's customer success team, drawing on internal consultants and external industry experts, has developed a curriculum to help different enterprises cultivate data analytics capabilities in their business teams. Whether on-site or online, they deliver business-facing, scenario-grounded data analytics methodology training, enabling business analysts to learn data analytics skills based on real business scenarios and become analytical champions within their organizations.

Second, Guandata partners with customers to drive the customer success journey based on "active users." As customers' businesses develop and user bases grow, Guandata explores with them how to upgrade data capabilities at different developmental stages, helping enterprises further build data culture and enhance data-driven momentum. More business users actively using the BI platform to make data-driven decisions gradually builds a data-driven organization.

In the final section on customer success, Su shared three tips for CEOs, which he summarized as "Execution can be gradual; understanding cannot be outsourced":

Guandata Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0: Ease of Use, Enterprise-Grade, Scenario-Based

"Build a great product that more people can use" was the founding team's original aspiration. "Create the world's most actively used analytics and decision-making product" is the long-term vision of Guandata's product and R&D team.

From this founding conviction to this enduring vision, Guandata co-founder and CTO Jin Zhang, at the "Empower Business Users · Guandata 2022 Intelligent Decision Summit and Product Launch," officially unveiled the "Guandata One-Stop Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0," focusing on the three core pillars of empowering business users — ease of use, enterprise-grade capability, and scenario-based design — with a series of platform capability upgrades.

In "ease of use," the Guandata One-Stop Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0 delivers comprehensive upgrades to its data analytics product line, enabling enterprises to achieve multiplied efficiency in data preparation through faster data exploration and more efficient SmartETL development; clearer, more reliable data analysis and visualization through batch shortcut operations in visual analytics, intelligent attribution for automated data insights, Minchart for more intuitive data analysis, and indicator trend charts for simpler performance metric analysis; satisfying diverse enterprise management needs through comprehensive upgrades to data applications and portal capabilities; and lower-barrier sharing and collaboration through upgrades to self-service data access, global search, subscription, and alerting — allowing business users to independently mine data value more conveniently.

In "enterprise-grade" capability, the Guandata One-Stop Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0 addresses the complexity, scale, pace, and demanding requirements faced by large enterprises, along with their needs for high performance, high extensibility, high stability, and high governance. It updates the platform's decision engine foundation and upgrades platform architecture, with cloud-native, big data, and AI integration as underlying technical support, meeting large enterprises' demands for containerization, distributed processing, and automation in the big data era, and continuously providing enterprise-grade analytics platforms for large-scale enterprises.

In "scenario-based design," the Guandata One-Stop Intelligent Analytics Platform 5.0 draws on Guandata's years of practice with advanced enterprises, deconstructing typical enterprise data analytics scenarios to build 100+ data connectors enabling enterprises to connect first-party, second-party, and third-party data and consolidate data assets; component assets for rapid, one-click installation of effective visual analytics; business applications including an e-commerce digital operations suite for comprehensive e-commerce digital operations solutions, and a business planning assistant adaptable to demand planning, logistics planning, inventory planning, and other scenarios for precise decision-making; and cloud inspection, which has already helped hundreds of customers with nearly a thousand reports and improved platform operations and inspection efficiency. Guandata assembles these in its cloud application marketplace, enabling enterprises across industries to rapidly acquire data analytics capabilities for typical business scenarios.

At Guandata's 2019 summit, founder and CEO Chunyuan Su posed a question: "The greatness of the Industrial Revolution was not inventing silk stockings for the queen, but enabling every factory worker to wear the same stockings as the queen." So what transformation might we see in the intelligent era? Zhang believes the core lies in Guandata's persistent mission to "empower business users, enable smarter decisions" — continuously optimizing and improving the customer success system, and iteratively upgrading the intelligent analytics platform, all in service of the vision behind "creating the world's most actively used analytics and decision-making product": enabling more enterprises and more business users to adopt the platform quickly, broadly, and actively.

Vision and Future Outlook

"Global leader in intelligent decision-making, enabling 1,000 users to experience the value of data" is the vision of all who journey far with Guandata. In the six years since its founding, we have held ourselves to constant reflection on the essence of the BI industry, resolutely doing the difficult but right things based on long-termism. Grounded in the philosophy and trend of empowering business users, Guandata has reverse-engineered its organization — from product R&D to customer success, marketing and services, to business model — building organizational capabilities from the end goal backward. Only thus can we genuinely assist every Guandata customer in enabling their business teams to adopt the platform quickly, broadly, and actively, helping more and more organizations like Genki Forest and China Merchants Bank achieve organization-wide agile decision-making and transform data analytics capability into competitive advantage.

2022 is the year modern BI rises. We have been privileged to journey alongside 500+ leading customers across industries. In the coming decade, we look forward to joining hands with 5,000, then 50,000 customers to empower business users together. A single spark can start a prairie fire — and it will. We look forward to more far-journeyers joining us in this great transformation.

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** Empower Business Users **

Guandata 2022 Intelligent Decision Summit and Product Launch

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