Informa and Aviation Week Use GoodData for Bespoke Solutions

Data-Driven From Day One

Known for having the most accurate and reliable data in the industry, Aviation Week provides industry professionals with business-critical predictive intelligence, deep data, and analytic insights through its Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN). AWIN data products provide decision-makers with the robust industry data needed to make daily business decisions in the commercial, business, and military sectors. Led by Director of Data Engineering Tim Jumps and Senior Product Manager Shambo Pfaff, the team at Aviation Week wanted to leverage the GoodData analytics platform to create customer-facing data products that would allow customers to utilize Aviation Week’s industry-leading datasets and create use-case and sector-specific reports.

GoodData’s Professional Services Team Quickly Learned Aviation Industry Needs

During the acquisition, the GoodData professional services team worked closely with Aviation Week to quickly understand the company, its customers, and the decision-makers’ needs for their aviation industry data. The team learned that the makeup of Aviation Week’s customer base consisted of commercial, military, and manufacturing customers that were interconnected but also disparate with their own unique data needs. Each customer could require access to one or more of Aviation Week’s vast datasets — which include fleet, flight, defense, and maintenance data. Each of these datasets contains information on inservice, on-order, or stored aircraft at major, regional, and cargo airlines; proprietary reports and analyses; as well as the latest intelligence on legislation and actions occurring within the industry.

However, while working with Aviation Week’s data team, the GoodData professional services team discovered that the real challenge was to create a flexible, customer-specific experience that satisfies each of these aviation communities without exposing sensitive data from one company to another. With details on more than 1,700 global operators in just the commercial and business sectors, it was critical for the team to create accurate and secure data experiences that aligned with Aviation Week’s best-in-class reputation.

Driving New Solutions Through Constant Collaboration

GoodData’s professional services team was there every step of the way as Aviation Week began leveraging the platform. The professional services team immediately started biweekly training sessions to get Aviation Week up to speed on how to use the GoodData platform effectively and to share tips and best practices. Once a solid foundation was established, the GoodData and Aviation Week teams continued to meet on a biweekly basis to workshop features, tweak processes, and build a proof of concept for new products. As a result of the biweekly service meetings and close relationship between Aviation Week and GoodData’s professional service team, the company created AWIN Intelligence bundles for each of its customer communities to identify new business and increase revenue.

“We enjoy working with the professional services team; they’ve really provided us with great service, expertise, and support,” said Jumps. “Over the last five years, we’ve built a great working relationship on how to build these products, and you can see that by how fast our products and our customer base have been growing.”

As a result of the biweekly service meetings and close relationship between Aviation Week and GoodData’s professional service team, the company created AWIN Intelligence bundles for each of its customer communities to identify new business and increase revenue.

• AWIN Commercial Aviation is the most efficient way to monitor the global industry and contains a database of over 70,000 active aircraft.
• AWIN Business Aviation contains databases providing details on over 23,000 businesses and general aviation operators and more than 30,0000 aircraft in service.
• AWIN Aerospace & Defense contains more than 400 airframe and engine programs, and 65,000-plus manned aircraft of all types in service at more than 250 operators from over 150 countries.
• AWIN Premium is the only online resource that spans the commercial, military, business aviation, and maintenance market sectors.

The creation of these intelligence bundles has granted Aviation Week the flexibility to provide several different solutions to meet customer data needs, while also meeting their budget constraints more frequently. The company can sell fleet, flight, and maintenance datasets either separately or together, and also can create bespoke bundles based on specific customer needs. This flexibility has provided Aviation Week with another competitive advantage as competitors increasingly seek to provide rival data and benchmarking products. The positive impact can also be seen in product growth and customer renewal rates as Aviation Week has grown its GoodData distribution from 40 to over 180 workspaces in just three years.

“Even during the pandemic, our customer base continued growing, not only because there was a huge desire for data, but also since the GoodData product allows us to deliver data to customers very quickly,” said Pfaff. “Even if we take a step back and look at the past five years, we’ve seen consistent user and revenue growth from our GoodData products, and the flexibility and accessibility of the platform has enabled that.”

Accelerating Informa’s Growth With Tailor-Made BI Solutions

Even though Aviation Week has a reputation for having the most accurate data in the industry, the company is facing increased competition as the aviation industry is becoming more data-driven and competitors prioritize providing customers with stronger data analytics. In a business environment where data is a true competitive asset, the ability to deliver high-quality data insights at a fast rate is even more critical. GoodData’s plug-and-play characteristics decrease the design cycle for Aviation Week to test and implement new products so that they can consistently meet industry needs before the competition.

“That’s one of the things I love about the GoodData platform,” said Jumps. “It’s the ability to get in and alter designs, change the ETL process, and build and manage different features soup to nuts.”

Looking forward, GoodData’s professional services team continues to act as a trusted partner and extension of the Aviation Week data team. The professional services team is actively working to create a solution that allows Aviation Week’s customers to pick and choose multiple datasets and quickly combine them into a single user experience with flight leg data for over 250,000 aircraft per day. The professional services team strives to add additional value here, having historically decreased Aviation Week’s development time for similar products from 14 months to only nine months.

About GoodData

GoodData is on a mission to break data silos. Real-time, open, secure, and scalable, GoodData’s leading composable data and analytics platform provides a single source of truth across organizations and to their customers. To this day, GoodData has helped more than 140,000 of the world’s top businesses deliver on their hosted or cloud-native analytics goals and scale their use cases — from self-service and embeddable analytics, to machine learning and IoT — all the while maintaining the performance, cost-efficiency, and easy change management of such a central and integrated solution.

GoodData has teams and data centers in the USA, Europe, and Asia, with customers including leading software companies (SaaS), global financial and payment institutions, and multi-brand e-commerce platforms.