Neudesic and Denodo Accelerate Adoption of Hybrid Cloud Solutions Using Data Virtualization
Companies that leverage data virtualization can quickly achieve their data and analytics goals, but the companies that get there first begin with a solid understanding of their desired business outcomes. Neudesic, a Denodo Gold Partner, is a National Solutions Provider that brings technology and business expertise together to help enterprise clients design, build, and run digital businesses in the cloud. I had the opportunity to spend time with Kola Bolarin and Lorrin Ferdinand from the Predictive Enterprise group at Neudesic to ask them about the joint value that both companies bring to customers.
Q: What makes the Neudesic partnership with Denodo unique in the market?
A: It all starts with a deep understanding of the customer environment and their pain points. The combination of a best-fit engineering approach to enterprise data architecture with a business-outcome-driven design makes Neudesic unique. We have technical experts that are deeply involved with the customer’s data architecture, applications, and infrastructure. We see first-hand how Denodo is able to solve many of the challenges customers are facing with their data projects. For instance, Denodo could enable an organic farm to integrate SaaS and other cloud-based data to improve operations at the field level on their farms across the nation. Another example is a specialty pharmacy that needed to build pro-forma financial statements with data from prospective acquisition targets. The Denodo Platform’s ability to federate data across multiple data sources, with metadata to drive visual impact analysis and data lineage, is ideally positioned to solve this problem.
Q: What are some of the main challenges your customers face with their data and analytics initiatives?
A: The challenges can be categorized into 5 main buckets:
- Increasing amount of data generated by cloud applications
- The complexity of big data migrations
- Self-service analytics hampered by uneven data availability
- The inability to perform impact analyses on ever-changing business requirements
- The need to enhance or augment an existing legacy data warehouse with new data sources
Large influxes of disparate data is the main concern for data and analytics initiatives. The migration of systems to the cloud using new SaaS solutions and big data adoption are big disruptors that require a rapid conversion from existing reporting solutions to new data sources and agile platforms. Companies want and need to embrace big data, but they need to go through an adjustment period before they find their wings using the new paradigm. The Denodo Platform eases these transitions. Given the potential of predictive analytics and AI, in combination with today’s voluminous datasets, data teams need to generate a return on that investment. The Denodo Platform can not only accelerate the time-to-value of those investments, but can also add unseen value by unlocking big data for extended teams that include everyone from data engineers, to business analysts, to data scientists.
Q: How does data virtualization bring value to Neudesic and their customers?
A: Simply put, it increases Neudesic’s ability to drive value through a data-service-oriented approach to data analytics. It helps our clients to focus more on the definitions of business use cases, metrics, and KPIs, and less on data integration. Data virtualization has an answer for each of these challenges.
I like to talk about it in terms of a narrative. Suppose a company decides to purchase a new cloud-based SaaS HRMS system. Shortly after installation, executives find that they preferred the “old reports” from their legacy HRMS system. The data team puts the Denodo Platform to work, to rapidly understand the data in the system. They recommend a data lake in the cloud to store flattened versions of the SaaS data. Because the Denodo Platform provides a familiar query-like interface, the data lake is now a valuable data source with which to build a set of views to satisfy the “old reports.” Furthermore, hearing of the speed with which the data team deployed the Denodo Platform to solve a business problem, the Data Science team now wants a playground in which to prospect for “data gold.” Once again, data engineers on the team can leverage the Denodo Platform and explore the SaaS data that is now in a data lake and look for new predictive insights about the business.
Q: Can you provide some examples?
A: A large hospitality organization undergoing a digital transformation initiative needed to move big data workloads to the cloud by migrating legacy lodging applications to a SaaS platform. Neudesic worked with the client to design and implement a modern cloud analytics platform and migration approach that leverages Azure storage and analytics services. The Denodo Platform provides data lineage, canonical views, and universal data access across cloud and on-premises applications. An elastic reference MDM solution was also developed to surface legacy lodging application codes and attributes to the SaaS platform and other downstream applications. Tremendous agility was injected into the project; Neudesic was able to adapt to multiple directional changes caused by the data migration initiatives.
Q: Where can we learn more about Neudesic capabilities and expertise?
A: Come and visit us during the Denodo DataFest conference in NYC on 1 November. You can also find more information about Neudesic’s 2018 vision at https://www.neudesic.com/technology-vision/
Our case studies are available at https://www.neudesic.com/all-insights/?case-study, and our thought-leadership events covering topics listed at https://www.neudesic.com/all-insights/?event.
- Advanced Technology Meets Advanced Intelligence - September 14, 2018
It’s always a beneficial thing to drive services through a data-service-oriented approach to data analytics, that’s what our tool does when it allows for data scientists with no prior coding experience to perform highly complex data analytics