Making Mobile Part of The Enterprise

Data in its most raw form starts as an infinite, formless river of facts and figures, but with increased mobile adoption, workers in the enterprise are demanding beautiful data that’s consistent with the user experience they’ve come to expect from their non-enterprise apps. While Excel has been the go-to tool to transform tables into charts and make sense of raw data – it’s main limitation is the freshness of the data. By the time it reaches the business users, the info is stale.

With more workers spending time on their mobile devices, it only makes sense for the enterprise to be able to deliver timely information in a good-looking package. At Progress we recognize a breed of specialist is emerging among marketers, sales professionals and business information analysts with a mission to improve and leverage those data ‘value chains’. Many weren’t trained specifically for this role but they understand their job and how technology can help them and their colleagues work smarter. That’s why everyone else on the team counts on them to help find the answers they need by pulling together the right data and presenting it in a format everyone else can make sense of.

Enter the Open Data (or OData) Protocol - a Web protocol for querying and updating data and was created to provide a simple, standardized way to interact with data on the web from any platform or device. It is built on HTTP for broad reach and users can access OData standardized APIs from a mobile or Web application and contact a broad spectrum of cloud and enterprise data sources through a cloud- based connectivity service.

As businesses look to facilitate access to their wealth of data, OData provides the ideal means to standardize the link between applications and the broad spectrum of enterprise data sources. Because it is built on standards such as REST and JSON, OData makes it easy for mobile, enterprise mobile, SaaS, Web, and PaaS applications to access data from sources such as Salesforce, DB2, Oracle and SQL Server.

To learn how we are pushing data integration to new heights and see step-by-step instructions on how to try DataDirect’s OData capabilities for yourself, check our latest blog post on the OData.org site. If you have any other questions, get in touch at @DataDirect_News!