Background and future plans for
Corda were presented by
Alan Winters , Product Management,
Mardell Cheney, CTO, and
Greg Turman, Director of Sales. Founded in 1996 and located near Provo UT, they have been able to remain self-funded and profitable in the Enterprise Performance Management Dashboards market with around 1,500 customers.
This is the second BBBT appearance for Corda. In March 2008, Shawn Rogers posted a
blog that gives a good overview of products and notes the book
The Service Profit Chain by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger, 1994. This book provided a key focus for in launching the company.
Alan mentioned an innovative approach called the
Corda Commons. It is an open-source agreement with a small number of selected partners, who have the ability to modify and redistributed the product under their brand. My opinion is that this is a useful variation of open-source theme, whereby the innovation of domain-specific knowledge
Corda has several patents in the area of their
Data Funnel that takes diverse data sources and provides the integration function for a diverse data consumers. On the surface, these patents seem quite universal and could give Corda some elbow-room in an increasing crowded marketplace.
After an overview of their current product line, we had a great discussion on the missing elements. John suggested visualization of business processes. I suggested that the addition of Web 2.0 collaborative and social networking functionality would cater to the new generation of knowledge workers.
Amid our vigorous discussion, Claudia posted a quick twitter "
Just starting the Boulder BI Bra Trust with Corda". LOL for the whole group. Lesson: check your twitters before pushing the Enter key.
Alan and Mardell demonstrated a cooooool iPhone app that connects into Corda CenterView to show coooool dashboards. Will be released with their next 4.0 version.
Overall of the various customers, such as: Amazon, Apple, Arizona State University, Comcast, DoD, and so on. I questioned what was Corda's sweet spot in the marketplace. This was a tough question, since their customer stories are all over the spectrum. It seems that the sweet spot is a company with mature data infrastructure but need performance metrics requiring cross-functional and external data.
There was lots of other discussion, most of which under NDA. Check Corda out. They have a 30-day trial, which I downloaded, installed, and connected to an external MySQL database during this session. Will play with it this afternoon.
