What You Missed in 2016: A DataDirect Retrospective

Can’t believe the year is over? Neither can we! Here are the highlights of 2016, from trend-setting products to OData to data democratization.

1. 10 Data Connectivity Blogs You Have to Read Before 2017

Wow! 2016 flew by, are you ready for 2017? Prepare with these 10 blogs and four infographics on data standards, big data, OData, data science, analytics, IoT, blockchain, data standards and more.

2. Top 2016 Videos for Data Freaks and Geeks

Are you a Data Geek? If so, you need to watch these videos from 2016 about mannequins, MongoDB, OData, Salesforce, TIBCO, Digital Transformation and more. Every year, we showcase the videos that you liked best. This year’s roundup includes everything from digital transformation to entire groups of grownup geeks acting like mannequins. Here’s the countdown.

3. Hybrid Data Pipeline Named Trend-Setting Product in Data and Information Management for 2017

Every year, Database Trends and Applications magazine looks for offerings that promise to help organizations derive greater benefit from their data, make decisions faster, and work smarter and more securely. Progress DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline, a data access service that provides access to organizations’ cloud and on-premises data sources for hybrid cloud applications, is a trending product and featured in this Spotlight post.

4. Salesforce Connect External Object Reporting Webinar Featured on OData.org

Starting in winter 2017, there is much rejoicing among report geeks as the Salesforce Connect product team delivers a seamless reporting experience with external data made possible by support for a standard OData REST interface. Watch the webinar replay of Ralf Schundelmeier (Director of Product Management, Salesforce) and Sumit Sarkar (Chief Data Evangelist, Progress) introducing this new feature.

5. Oracle Recommends Progress DataDirect for ODBC Export

Progress DataDirect delivers standards-based ODBC/JDBC drivers for accessing Oracle Service Cloud data and offers compatibility with any off-the-shelf BI/analytics software using ODCB or JDBC for data access. Read the whitepaper to learn more and simplify your BI with data connectivity to Oracle Service Cloud.

6. Gartner Provided Insight Into Critical Capabilities for Data Integration Tools

When selecting a data integration vendor, you need to understand their core strengths and enabling technologies. IT buyers need the ability to identify the data integration use cases that their organization needs in order to enable the ongoing agility of information capabilities based on short- and long-term business requirements. Learn how to reduce costs and accelerate deployment in this complimentary Gartner report.

7. Progress DataDirect Releases the Industry’s First Lightweight, Embeddable Hybrid Data Access Service

Data connectivity has been completely disrupted by the proliferation of cloud applications. How did we get here and how do we overcome the challenges created by this disruption? This is what we explored in our webinar, “How Hybrid Data Pipeline Transforms How Clouds Access Data.” Here’s the story of how this need for hybrid connectivity developed, and what Hybrid Data Pipeline can do to disrupt this disruption.

8. Sumit Sarkar Reveals Hybrid Data Pipeline at Dreamforce 2016

Starting winter 2017, Salesforce users can run reports that access external data from cloud and on-premises sources, including warehouses, marts, lakes and more. With Salesforce Connect External Objects, you get real-time connectivity that is self-service for Salesforce Report developers.

Hybrid Data Pipeline and the DataDirect Cloud OData service leverage external objects via OData. You can self host your service with Hybrid Data Pipeline or try hosted SaaS with DataDirect Cloud. This enables instant access to Salesforce data from any OData-aware applications while significantly reducing your integration time.

9. Progress DataDirect Sponsored the Nation’s Largest API and Integration Hackathon

Progress issued a challenge at the Integrate 2016 hackathon with a prize worth over $8000. The challenge was to build an app for voice assistant services using the OData API. Saikrishna Teja Bobba, our OData ninja at Progress, set up Amazon Echo with the Alexa voice service to access DataDirect Cloud via voice commands as an demo. Check it out in this blog!

 

— Sai Krishna Teja (@the_dataguy) September 2, 2016

 

10. Sumit Sarkar Takes the Stage at MicroStrategy World

DataDirect partnered with MicroStrategy to enable users to access cloud sources through an SQL interface, which is already familiar to most BI engineers and business analysts. Sumit’s session gave an overview of our partnership and explained the process of turning cloud sources into databases. This partnership further materialized later in 2016 with our webinar “SQL or SOQL for Salesforce Analytics.”

11. TIBCO Jaspersoft Shared the Inside Story on MongoDB BI Connectors

With the plethora of options to connect to MongoDB for BI, it’s hard to find the choice that is tailored to your personal needs. Our webinar will contrast the Progress DataDirect ODBC/JDBC BI connectors with the MongoDB BI Connector and give insight into the best fit for your business. Check out this video:

12. Shifting the Analytics Industry at DataDirect Partner Summit

The Progress DataDirect Partner Summit is an annual event that connects industry luminaries for data connectivity with our partners who are using or developing the new technologies. Our influential partners include seven of the top nine leaders in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI.

This first multi-vendor summit on industry standards across ODBC 4.0 and OData 4.x was an amazing educational opportunity and networking event for attendees. And it’s really exciting that these discussions will ultimately determine which way the data and analytics industry will evolve toward accessing data. Here’s what some of the attendees had to say about the event:

13. Progress Wins Silver Stevie Award, People’s Choice Award and DBTA 100

DataDirect not only won a silver Stevie, the team won a People’s Choice Award. An adjunct award to the Stevies, the People Choice Awards are voted upon publicly and they are not peer adjudicated. All Stevie winners in the new product awards categories of this year’s American Business Awards were eligible for public voting for the People’s Choice awards. Along with these awards, Progress claimed a spot in the DBTA 100 Companies that matter most in data for DataDirect Cloud.

14. You Picked Our Top 13 Tutorials

We had a tutorial rumble earlier this year where our engineers brainstormed and created tutorials for topics best suited to help you with any and every data connectivity problem. In this post, you voted for your favorites in real time in our survey! Thank you for your feedback to make our blog the best it can be.

15. Mike Johnson, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Featured in SD Times Spotlight

SD Times spoke with Mike Johnson, Senior Director of Research and Development for Progress DataDirect, about what developers and ISVs need to know about the changing database technologies landscape and how to overcome the challenges of exploding data sources.

16. We Successfully Predicted the Future in Our 2014 Survey (Mostly)

Take a look at the top 10 predictions you made in our 2014 Data Connectivity Survey and how they align with the realities of 2016. These predictions are based on our 2014 survey, while the “realities” are from our 2016 Data Connectivity Survey.

We thought it would be interesting to compare our results with DB-Engines.com, a vendor-neutral entity dedicated to collecting and presenting unbiased information on database management systems.

17. You Voted for Your Favorite Data Topics for #GetToKnowYourCustomersDay

We love that we have an active community with participants that vote to tell us what they like. For recent "Get to Know Your Customer" days, we released several Twitter polls to get an understanding of the content you are interested in and want us to create. The infographic below summarizes the top six topics you want more of.

18. Our Cassandra ODBC Connector Is the First ODBC 4.0 Specification Feature to Directly Pass Through CQL to the Database

Our latest release of Progress DataDirect for ODBC for Apache Cassandra Driver Release 8.0, along with our March release of the JDBC 6.0 connector, includes technology to normalize NoSQL data stored in Apache Cassandra. This technology for NoSQL databases is patented by Progress and is the first ODBC 4.0 specification feature to directly pass through native Cassandra Query Language (CQL) to the database.

Thank You and Happy New Year!

Thank you to our customers, who provided feedback and made 2016 a great success. You actively participated and gave us insight into your challenges and needs, and we appreciate you! We constantly strive to create the best data connectivity solutions and propel your business forward. In the spirit of the New Year and new beginnings, you may want to consider evaluating any of our products free for 30 days and maximize the potential of your data.

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