It's All About the Data

It really is all about the data.  That’s what struck me as I spoke with customers and partners this year at Progress Exchange 2013.  That’s not to say they didn’t rave about the new brand, the commitment to their business, or the innovation they saw.  They did all of that and more. But the stories I heard about their data integration problems seemed much more prevalent.  Let me share just a couple very quickly.

Click to tweet: It really is about data. @ProgressSW's Dion Picco shares customer thoughts on #data integration in his latest blog.

In terms of pure volume, the dominant discussions I had involved connecting BI tools and dashboards to SaaS applications.  From Tableau, Qlikview, and Cognos to Salesforce, Eloqua, Microsoft Dynamics, and Hubspot, the integration challenges were consistent: “How do I simplify the way I connect to these sources of data, in a way that is compatible with my tools, and do so in real-time to avoid dealing with stale data?”

On the topic of Big Data, I had a great discussion with a partner who builds applications for the Telco and Utilities industries.  His Utilities application collects meter information from 6000 sites every 5 minutes and dumps it into an Apache Cassandra instance for analysis and reporting.  MongoDB primarily powers his web infrastructure.  His Cassandra deployment currently contains 50 BILLION records, which is really the Big Data story here as his MongoDB deployment is still rather small in comparison.  In both cases, though, he still needs an efficient way of accessing and analyzing that data in a high performance and highly compatible way.

Another partner I spoke with works for a very large multinational banking and financial services company in New York.  His OpenEdge application needs a SQL connectivity layer that accesses his information through his Application Server layer and business logic, rather than directly to the database.  His need to redefine a simplified schema, and ensure security and privacy of data, drove this decision to avoid direct database connectivity.

There are many more stories like this but these should illustrate the point that no application is an island anymore.  Businesses use many different applications and the need to access and analyze that data is extremely critical to their success.  That is why I am so excited to work at Progress DataDirect.  We have solutions to all of these problems and more, and I want to make sure that all of our Progress partners and customer are aware of this.  So to do so, here are a few links that I think many of you will find very helpful.

Do you want to connect your OpenEdge application to SaaS application data, such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics?  We have an ‘ABL to ODBC’ bridge that makes it easy to access data using any of the Progress DataDirect suite of ODBC drivers, including our newest offering DataDirect Cloud.  You can download the bridge here, free of charge, and ready to consume in your OpenEdge application: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/docs/DOC-109252

Click to tweet: Want to connect your #OpenEdge #app to #SaaS data? @ProgressSW can help!

And if you need help getting started, we’ve put together this quick video to show you how:

While this video discusses it in the context of DataDirect Cloud, it will work with any of our on-premise ODBC drivers too.

If you need to write a custom driver for your application that connects through the AppServer layer instead of directly to the database, try out our OpenAccess SDK.  You can download and get started here: http://www.datadirect.com/products/open-access

And, finally, if you need to access data sources directly in real-time using your application, your dashboard, or your favorite BI tools, we provide a broad set of drivers that you can use to solve your data integration needs: http://www.datadirect.com/supported-data-sources

I can’t wait for Progress Exchange 2014.  Not only am I looking forward to these customers coming on stage and telling you about their success, I can’t wait to share a few stories and drinks with the best group of partners in the world.