From People Insights to Cloud-Native Business Intelligence

June 26, 2023

In 2020 we started Montara to revolutionize how organizations and managers understand and manage employees. We spent 18 months building a groundbreaking platform that analyzed information flowing through the organization to help HR, managers and employees better understand people dynamics and provided a broad array of people insights to HR teams and managers. We launched Montara in February of 2022, with marquee pilot customers and quickly iterated and developed a product that our early customers loved and enjoyed. In 2021 and early 2022, demand for employees was high, companies were growing quickly and understanding employees and improving employee engagement and experience were top priority for leaders and organizations. 

But as 2022 progressed, the world changed: the economy started cooling off, compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and many other macro factors. Organizations started focusing more on survival and less on employee experience and business growth. Since our value proposition was enabling companies to thrive and grow through improving employee engagement, experience and management, we realized we will not be able to grow and succeed in building a revolutionary new way of managing employees. We went back to the drawing board.

Building Montara required significant expertise in data engineering and data analysis, as well as developing a deep understanding of the challenges that companies faced when trying to extract meaning from their data.  We knew we wanted to take advantage of our extensive experience in the data analysis space when figuring out a new path. 

In conversations with dozens of companies we’ve heard that data analysis is still a key priority for companies, and in fact the demand for insights is growing quickly with the explosion in data collected by organizations. Analysts are expected to produce more with less these days. As companies focus more on the bottom line and efficiency, maintaining a large team of data engineers, analytics engineers and analysts to enable data analysis is not an option. We realized this is the opportunity we were looking for – our expertise in building a powerful data analysis platform and our experience in simplifying analysis and insights for non-technical users could be put to work to create a solution that will enable analysts and BI teams to do it all: transform and model data, run pipelines and analyzed and visualize the data.

Today we are announcing the new Montara – a general cloud-native BI platform that enables analysts to use the skills they have today (namely SQL) to do it all:

  • Model and transform data quickly and easily using SQL only
  • Run data pipelines without having to configure and manage environments or servers
  • Enable data discovery and get data lineage (including report-level lineage!)
  • Run ad-hoc analysis and create reports 

We are excited for what the future holds and look forward to working with the Business Intelligence community everywhere!