In January 2022, already a year ago, Opendatasoft announced that it had raised 21 million euros. This sum was to be used for development its international growth. It has thus increased its workforce “by more than 50%”. Last October he moved to a new Paris office located in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.
However, it is necessary to clarify what Opendatasoft means by international. “We have a very European footprint,” admits Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “We want to develop some leadership in Europe, which we have managed to do open data “.
A “Very European Footprint”
Opendatasoft first became known for its open data display, sharing, and visualization capabilities. The measures adopted by the French State within the framework of art the law for a digital republic in 2016, it encouraged the adoption of its platform by public authorities. The law on energy transition, passed the same year (which obliges energy operators to share data on their gas and electricity consumption as well as those of their subscribers) has also favored the growth of the publisher in that sector.
Other European countries have taken or are taking similar measures.
“In 2022, we gained many new energy customers in the UK,” says Franck Carassus, CEO North America and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “Energy distributors, such as UK Power Network, Scottish Power Network need to manipulate data, to democratize access to it. We had done more or less the same job two or three years ago in France with Enedis, GRDF, etc. “.
“In 2022, we gained many new customers from the energy world in the UK.”
Franco CarassoCEO for North America and co-founder of Opendatasoft
“It’s a trend that will continue into 2023,” he adds.
Last year, Jean-Marc Lazard said that the SaaS platform has also been adopted by banks, insurers and even telecom operators.
In general, “the logic is to validate a certain number of use cases, then replicate them in the countries where we are present”, he repeats.
Therefore, Opendatasoft wants to continue its growth in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, the Gulf countries and Australia.
In Europe, the publisher relies mainly on its own commercial means. In Italy, Australia and Japan, on the other hand, it passes through Value Added Resellers (VARs). “We do not intend to invest in other countries in the APAC region. In 2023, we will focus on Europe, North America and the Middle East,” says Franck Carassus.
This does not necessarily mean that Opendatasoft will open new offices in the year 2023.
“Today we are present in 25 countries. We have two offices in France, in Paris and Nantes and another in Boston. The beauty of the cloud and new ways to address customers allow us to have an international footprint without having offices all over the world.”
A multi-cloud approach
The technical developments of the platform are modeled on these ambitions. Thus, in 2022, Opendatasoft has bet on the interoperability of its platform, with a greater number of IS and software dedicated to data processing. For example, last April, the publisher introduced native connectors for Google BigQuery and Amazon S3.
From left to right, Opendatasoft co-founders: David Thomases,
Franck Carassus and Jean-Marc Lazard – Credits: Opendatasoft
“Our customers’ information systems are changing rapidly,” says David Thoumas, CTO and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “There are more and more cloud-native players who manage to implement their platform within large organizations: Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, etc. We therefore have an interest in offering our customers the ability to source their data portals from these environments.”
In addition to connectors for various data sources, Opendatasoft plans to adapt its architecture to support its multicloud strategy. “We already support 3DS Outscale and AWS. In 2022, we brought our platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” informs David Thoumas. “It was necessary to understand the architecture of this host and exploit its distributions in order to be able to exploit its presence in regions where AWS, Microsoft and Google are not installed.”
“We have two clients in Saudi Arabia – their instances are running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in Jeddah. Our approach is to find a cloud offering that meets their needs,” explains Franck Carassus.
In 2023, Opendatasoft launches Kubernetes
From a commercial point of view, Opendatasoft has an interest in distributing to suppliers chosen by its customers. Just as it is relevant for him to offer his offers on the marketplaces of the three mastodons AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP.
“This hyperscaler marketplace presence is one of our challenges for the next two to three years,” anticipates David Thomas.
“Many companies use their contract with one of the hyperscalers to pay for third-party software on a pay-as-you-go basis. This is a trend that we will explore in 2023,” confirms the North America CEO.
This involves adoption Kubernetes, a flagship technology that Opendatasoft started investing in last year. “Our offer is SaaS: our customers turn to us to exploit the resources of the underlying cloud. It was a good time to start investing in Kubernetes. It’s not trivial, it’s an impressive technology, but rather complex to adopt, you need to increase the capabilities of the teams. We will start reaping the fruits of this work in 2023”, continues the CTO.
” [Kubernetes est] an impressive technology, but complex enough to adopt, we need to increase the skills of the teams”.
David ThumasCTO and co-founder of Opendatasoft
This involves the harmonization of deployment practices on the various clouds and – “possibly” – the deployment of the Opendatasoft platform on Google Cloud.
Also, the publisher will improve his own APIs. “One of our key interfaces, the Explore API, is used not only to collect datasets, but also to search and transform them,” she recalls.
One of the central building blocks of this architecture is a search engine: Elasticsearch. “In 2022, we continued to leverage the analytics capabilities of Elasticsearch to achieve richer, easier-to-use APIs closer to the SQL paradigm,” said David Thomas.
The publisher will continue to update these programming interfaces in 2023. It also intends to open up more platform control functions through its management API.
“Many of our customers have asked us to have the possibility to automate some aspects, such as linking the publication of a dataset to an event or synchronizing the metadata of an Opendatasoft portal with the governance tool chosen by an organization”, explains the CTO .
Simplify and monitor data usage
Finally, Opendatasoft wants to make it easier for users to exploit data.
“We have launched a new tool, ODS Studio, which offers a no-code experience to our customers. This allows you to build “data stories”, dashboards”, he continues.
In 2022, the publisher added the ability to leverage geographic data in ODS Studio “in just a few clicks”, and intends to adapt this approach to other types of data, as it has already done for the SIREN database. “It’s the beginning of the story from this point of view,” says David Thomas.
For companies who want to develop custom portals or views, Opendatasoft will improve its SDKs and push its partners’ services, such WedoData.
Additionally, the data exposure specialist plans to facilitate access to resources referenced on its portals by its customers’ third-party BI tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, or others.
“We aim to get data to the right place at the right time, whether it’s data that resides in the customer’s IS, or it’s open data that our federation capabilities will be able to integrate into their own systems.”
“When we talk about interoperability, we often think about sourcing data, but we also need to get it where people consume it,” adds Jean-Marc Lazard.
In the future, the publisher will rely on the traceability of the data and its use. “It’s a new field for us. This is an opportunity to introduce new technologies. We have invested in the graph-oriented technology of Neo4J. It allows us to materialize the relationships between the objects that make up the platform: our customers’ open datasets, the relationships between datasets, their reuse. We are working on developing a feature of data lineage “.
The primary objective will be to obtain data traceability in the Opendatasoft ecosystem. The editor aims to expand this capability, for example to understand how data exposed via ODS is used in a mobile application or BI platform. “Often data starts from a system where it is more or less ordered, well modelled. Then, it’s reused three links later in a completely different environment. What happened between the two? “, explains Jean-Marc Lazard. “The challenge is to promote controlled use of data,” he adds.
A “new” positioning in the customer’s IS
With this roadmap, Opendatasoft places its platform as a complementary building block of companies’ data architecture. “18 months ago we didn’t have discussions with the CIOs,” explains Franck Carassus. “Today these discussions are more frequent, because there are technological gaps. The companies have stored, they have put quality, now data must be made accessible to businesses “, he insists. “Our platform enables the development of self-service data access portals as well as data warehouses and lakes, virtualization tools, data governance and cataloging.”
“Our customers seem convinced by the cloud and the best of the breed. There are enough mature, future-proof and interoperable solutions on the market now.”
Jean-Marc LazardCEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft
It is for this reason that the publisher is turning to cloud service providers and publishers like Databricks or denode. “Our customers seem convinced by the cloud and the best of the breed. There are now enough mature, durable and interoperable solutions on the market,” assures Jean-Marc Lazard.
In 2022 Opendatasoft saw its turnover grow by 30%. This CA is divided equally between “the public sphere and the private sphere”. The publisher has achieved more than €10 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2023, the publisher expects growth “over 30%”. It counts, among other things, on the extension of use cases among its customers. “Half of our revenue comes from upsale,” informs the North American CEO.
Leaders want to be confident and not fear the market slowdown anticipated by market observers, including Gartner.
“Companies are cautious in their investments,” acknowledges Jean-Marc Lazard. “They choose their priority by adopting “must-have” solutions. We have the advantage of offering a ready-to-use solution, from which we can reap the benefits faster,” he concludes.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
