Marketing & Sales Ops Professionals: Self-Service Data Integration has Arrived!

If you’re a business analyst and your job requires you to build dashboards, reports, or other analytics on company data that leads to business decisions, then your job is likely pretty fun. Well, provided all of the information you need is in a single data source. But, how often does that happen? More likely, you are asked to put together some metrics, KPIs, or other analysis on information that is stored in multiple data sources. For example, customer information is in your Salesforce.com CRM, marketing information is in your Marketo marketing automation system, and your financial information is sitting on-premise in an Oracle or OpenEdge database. #notfunatall

Depending on the size of your company, these types of requests are handled in a number of ways. In some companies, these requests mean a trip to the IT department, data scientist, or to someone else who can help you navigate the data warehouse or, worst case, start a project to get a new scenario built into the data warehouse. In other cases, you’re left downloading data into multitudes of Excel spreadsheets and then spending time combining those Excel spreadsheets into one giant pivot table that hopefully doesn’t contain any mistakes. #paininthebutt

Data integration is hard. There’s usually a whiteboard discussion that takes place with each data integration project, involving many lines and cylinders. Each line and cylinder means money, time and complexity, but data integration has been hard forever, so why hasn’t anyone invented something easier?

That something easier is finally here! Recently, Progress released a disruptive data integration product called Progress Easyl, part of Progress Pacific Platform as a Service (PaaS), that is targeted at business professionals seeking a self-service way to combine data from multiple data sources. No trips to IT, no combining Excel spreadsheets, no white boards, no BS.

Let’s walk through an example: your marketing team wants to create a targeted email list to all CxOs, in either the healthcare or financial services sectors of your business, where the company has spent at least $1m with you in the last 3 years. Oh yeah – and you only want those in the United States. Ultimately, you’re looking to build this in your favorite analytics tool. Using Progress Easyl, you can build a data set that will power your analytical engine. With Easyl, you – and this is an important word – YOU can point and click your way to connect to the necessary data sources (both in the cloud and on-premise) and create a data set in the cloud that you can then use with your analytical engine. To your analytics products, the Easyl data set will look like a single source and you will be able to use it that way. Did I mention Easyl also creates an Excel spreadsheet with all the information too, just in case you want it? You pick where you want the information to come from, and boom, your report is done without you ever having to get up from your desk. #timeforlunch

Self-service data integration has arrived.

Want to learn more about @ProgressSW #Easyl? Join us at the SiriusDecisions Summit 2014 (#SDSummit), May 21-23, where we’ll show you firsthand how Easyl can help you unlock your raw data and turn it into business insights and dashboards. Can’t wait until the 21^st? Register now for a free trial.