Tag Archives: data management

Diyotta: Data integration for the enterprise

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I’m still catching up and reviewed a video of last month’s Diyotta presentation to the BBBT. The company is another young, founded in 2011, data integration company working to take advantage of current technologies to provide not just better data integration but also better change management of modern data infrastructures. In many ways, they’re similar to another company, WhereScape, which I discussed last year. Both are young and small, while the market is large and the need is great.

The presentation was given by Sanjay Vyas, CEO, and John Santaferraro, CMO. The introduction by Sanjay was one of the best from a small company founder that I’ve seen in a long time. He gave a brief overview of the company, its size, it’s global structure (with HQ in Charlotte, NC, and two offshore development centers). Then he went straight to what most small companies leave for last: He presented a case study.

My biggest B2B marketing point is that you need to let the market know you understand it. Far too many technical founders spend their time talking about the technology they built to solve a business problem, not the business problem that was addressed by technology. Mr. Vyas went to the heart of the matter. He showed the pain in a company, the solution and, most importantly, the benefits. That is what succeeds in business.

It also wasn’t an anonymous reference, it was Scotiabank, a leading Canadian bank with a global presence. When a company that large gives a named reference to a startup as small as is Diyotta, you know the firm is happy.

John Santaferraro then took over for a bit with mostly positive impact. While he began by claiming a young product was mature because it’s version 3.5, no four year old firm still working on angel investments has a fully mature product. From the case study and what was demo’d later, it’s a great product but it’s clear it’s still early and needs work. There’s no need to oversell.

The three main markets John said Diyotta aims at are:

  • Big data analytics.
  • Data warehouse modernization.
  • Hybrid data integration including cloud and on-premises (though John was another marketing speaker who didn’t want to use the “s” at the end).

While the other two are important, I think it’s the middle one that’s the sweet spot. They focus on metadata to abstract business knowledge of sources and targets. While many IT organizations are experimenting with Hadoop and big data, getting a better understanding and improved control over the entire EDW and data infrastructure as big data is added and new mainline techniques arrive is where a lot more immediate pain exists.

Another marketing miss that could have incorporated that key point was when Mr. Santaferrero said that the old ETL methods no longer work because “having a server in the middle of it … doesn’t exist anymore.” The very next slide was as follows.

Diyotta markitechture slide

Diyotta still seems to have a server in the middle, managing the communications between sources and targets through metadata abstraction. The little “A’s” in the data extremities are agents Diyotta uses to preprocess requests locally to optimize what can be optimizes natively, but they’re still managed by a central system.

The message would be more powerful by explaining that the central server is mediating between sources and targets, using metadata, machine learning and other modern tools, to appropriately allocate processing at source, in the engine or in the target in the most optimal way.

While there’s power in the agents, that technology has been used in other aspects of software with mixed results. One concern is that it means a high need for very close partnerships with the systems in which the agents reside. While nobody attending the live presentation asked about that, it’s a risk. The reason Sanjay and John kept talking about Netezza, Oracle and Teradata is because those are the firms whose products Diyotta has created agents. Yes, open systems such as Hadoop and Spark are also covered, but agents do limit a small company’s ability to address a variety of enterprises. The company is still small, so as long as they focus on firms with similar setups to Scotiabank, they have time to grow, to add more agents and widen their access to sources; but it’s something that should be watched.

On the pricing front, they use pricing purely based on the hub. There’s no per user or per connector pricing. As someone who worked for companies that used pricing that involved connectors, I say bravo! As Mr. Vyas pointed out, their advantage is how they manage sources and targets, not which ones you want them to access. While connecting is necessary, it’s not the value add. The pricing simplifies things and can save money compared with many more complex pricing schemes that charge for parts.

The final business point concerns compliance. An analyst in the room (Sorry, I didn’t catch the name) asked about Sarbanes-Oxley. The answer was that they don’t yet directly address compliance but their metadata will make it easier. For a company that focuses on metadata and whose main reference site is a major financial institution, it would serve their business to add something to explicitly address compliance.

Summary

Diyotta is a young company addressing how enterprises can leverage big data as target and source alongside the existing infrastructure through better metadata management and data access. They are young and have many of the plusses and minuses that involves. They have some great technology but it’s early and they’re still trying to figure out how to address what market.

The one major advantage they have, given what I’ve seen in only a two hour presentation, is Sanjay Vyas. Don’t judge a startup on where they are now or where you think they need to be. Judge them on whether or not management seems capable of getting from point A to point B. Listening to Mr. Vyas, I heard a founder who understands both business and technology and will drive them in the direction they need to go.

TDWI Webinar Review: David Loshin & Liaison on Data Integration

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The most recent TDWI webinar had a guest analyst, David Loshin of Knowledge Integrity. The presentation was sponsored by Liaison and that company’s speaker was Manish Gupta. Given that Liaison is a cloud provider of data integration, it’s no surprise that was the topic.

David Loshin gave a good overview of the basics of data integration as he talked about the growth of data volumes and the time required to manage that flow. He described three main areas to focus upon to get a handle on modern integration issues:

  • Data Curation
  • Data Orchestration
  • Data Monitoring

Data curation is the organization and management of data. While David accurately described the necessity of organizing information for presentation, the one thing in curation that wasn’t touched upon was archiving. The ability to present a history of information and make it available for later needs. That’s something the rush to manage data streams is forgetting. Both are important and the later isn’t replacing the former.

The most important part of the orchestration Mr. Loshin described was in aligning information for business requirements. How do you ensure the disparate data sources are gathered appropriately to gain actionable insight? That was also addressed in Q&A, when a question asked why there was a need to bother merging the two distinct domains of data integration and data management. David quickly pointed out that there was no way not to handle both as they weren’t really separate domains. Managing data streams, he pointed out, was the great example of how the two concepts must overlap.

Data monitoring has to do with both data in motion, as in identifying real-time exceptions that need handling, and data for compliance, information that’s often more static for regulatory reporting.

The presentation then switched to Manish Gupta, who proceeded to give the standard vendor introduction. It’s necessary, but I felt his was a little too high level for a broader TDWI audience. It’s a good introduction to Liaison, but following Mr. Loshin there should have been more detail on how Liaison addresses the points brought up in the first half of the presentation – Just as in a sales presentation, a team would lead with Mr. Gupta’s information, then the salesperson would discuss the products in more detail.

Both presenters had good things to say, but they didn’t mesh enough, in my view, and you can find out far more talking to each individually or reading their available materials.

Alation at the BBBT: Metadata Discovery and Management for Governance and Performance

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Last Friday’s presenters to the BBBT were Satyen Sangani, CEO, and Anand Aidasani, Customer Development Lead, from Alation. The company is a two and a half year old startup that released its first product in March – a tool to help analysts better understand the metadata surrounding their corporate data.

One of the early and powerful statements by Mr. Sangini was that big data is more than volume and had a lot to do with the variety of data. I’ve talked about that before, so it is good to see more vendors openly admitting the fact. One caveat: They quickly JDBC, and move on. There was no mention about breadth of data accessed by their existing clients or any performance issues. When you talk with them, make sure to ask specific questions about your data sources.

You won’t be surprised when I now turn to their marketing message. They present a top level message of making it easier for business knowledge workers to get the information they need, but the product is all about the data analyst. While helping the later group does indirectly help the former, the message needs to be more focused on the analysts but with a split message about how they can both do their jobs faster and help their business clients respond more quickly with more accurate information.

They had a good ROI message for analysts, presented in the following slide.Alation time savings

That has a lot of good content but needs to be simplified and clarified to fit into sales and marketing messages focused at IT, analysts and end users – the challenge of true enterprise positioning.

The Platform

Their best strategic slide was the one where they present their platform with the high level goals of the firm.Alation platform

Data governance. I’ve come back to it regularly, and it matters. Even a year ago, many business intelligence startups were crowing about ignoring IT and letting users do what they want. Enterprise customers have pushed back and the smart folks have listened. Modern BI needs to be about getter better data to business people faster while still ensuring that the information matches company, contractual and regulatory governance issues. That Alation lists governance first shows a strong understanding of market needs.

Alation’s collaboration is early and, again, focused primarily on analysts and other technical people. There are some great features to see SQL being used throughout the organization and analytics about the usage. What can be shared to business users who aren’t gurus needs to be improved, but it’s a young company and the collaboration they have is a great start in helping understand data as a team to speed development and improve governance.

Their platform doesn’t directly optimize queries, but there are some nice analytics available. Just as importantly, when the software identifies either an inefficient query or one that might be slow do to a large result set, a warning can be displayed to the analyst before the query is run. It’s another first generation feature that’s nice but could use more power and breadth combined, from what I could see in a short demo, a better user interface.

What Is It?

The biggest challenge for Alation is not technology, it’s marketing. What are they? They’re not an ETL tool, a pure metadata application, or a BI product. They overlap a few areas but I’m not sure where they’d be categorized by all the analyst first that feel they must categorize everything. More importantly, if the Alation management can’t figure out how to message a clear message to the market, it’s going to significantly slow the sales cycle.

My view is that they are primarily a metadata tool, but a number of BBBT members expressed dismay at the mention of metadata. The pushback was the business customers don’t understand metadata. The issue I have with that argument is that it’s an IT/analyst product and they understand metadata. For the business users who are involved in the purchase decision, Alation can certainly create content that focuses on the benefits the product brings to them, which can avoid talking about metadata, but there’s no need to avoid the word in the core content focused at their primarily technical audience.

Alation seems to be a good new tool for understand where you data is coming from to improve data governance and performance. The brief time we had didn’t get me much further than that. If you’re in need of better understanding your complex information infrastructure, spend some time with them and see what they have to offer.

TDWI Webinar Review: What is Data Platform as a Service (dPaaS) and What Can it Do For Your Business?

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Yesterday’s TDWI webinar was sponsored by Liaison Technologies, who did the same thing last year. It’s a push for another acronym. While the acronym isn’t needed, the concept is. Data Platform as a Service is just using the cloud to help with data integration. Gosh, complex, ‘eh? I think it’s the natural progression of technology and business, it’s just data management on the cloud. But forget the marketing, let’s talk about the concept.

Cloud data management

The presentation’s first half was delivered by Phillip Russom. He started with some very trivial level setting but then quickly got to a key point. If you’ve been around for a while, you remember Best of Breed. That’s when each vendor focused product company, somewhere in the information supply chain, talked about their openness and how you could piece together a solution from different vendors. That made sense at the time, since many companies were each creating the early version of parts of a full solution.

As Phillip pointed out, times have changed. We now better understand business needs, have learned more about coding the requirements and can access far better hardware than we had fifteen years ago. That means IT is looking for what they couldn’t find back then: An integrated solution from a single or a far more limited number of vendors. They want something simpler than a hodgepodge of multiple systems.

The advantages of the cloud aren’t specific to data management. One very key business driver that was minimized in Mr. Russom’s presentation but brought out later by Patrick Adamiak during his presentation then revisited by both in the Q&A is capex versus opex – something often ignored by technical folks. Having your own hardware and data center is not just costly, it’s part of capital expenditure. Service contracts with a cloud vendor are operational expenses. That means the CxO suite and Board are often happier with that because it’s not as locked it and creates flexibility in the corporate financial picture.

One nit I had with Mr. Russom’s presentation was his statement that cloud is another architecture, like client/server or the web. The cloud and web are client server, that’s not the issue. It’s another architecture in two other key aspects: The already mentioned capex/opex divide, and the way it changes a software vendor’s ability to manage and update their software in comparison to on-premises installations.

One caution he gave that needed more explanation for folks new to the cloud was when Mr. Russom mentioned that you need to ask about the elasticity of the cloud implementation. For those who might not have heard the term, elasticity is the ability to grow or shrink cloud resources in order to match processing demands. In other words, if you get a big data dump from another source, can you quickly access more disk space? Or, from the Web side of the house: You’re hosting a big event or making a major announcement on your Web site: Can site resources be replicated quickly to handle the additional load then released when no longer needed?

Liaison

I was impressed by the fact that capex was mentioned on Patrick Adamiak’s first slide. Cloud technology has multiple advantages that can be communicated to IT, but it’s the capex/opex issue that will help close the deal in an enterprise setting. Liaison seems to understand the need to blend technical and business messages.

However, most of Mr. Adamiak’s presentation seemed to be about justifying the new acronym. The main slide compared dPaaS with other supposed solutions without admitting there’s really a lot of overlap between them. The columns weren’t as different as he’d like them to be.

His company slides didn’t seem any different than those I’ve seen from the many other firms in the space. Forget all of that, it was in a short webinar with TDWI, so he had limited time.

The fact is that Liaison claims they are where the market is going. They are vertically integrating the information supply chain while leveraging the cloud for its business and technology advantages. For those in IT looking to simplify their world, Liaison is a company that should be investigated.