Masters of Disrupting the Disruption from SQL, NoSQL, IoT, Big Data, SaaS

There is a growing sentiment among data connectivity professionals, in the real world, around disruption. From my consulting projects, it typically starts out with a requirement to integrate a new system and we deliver the data connectivity.

Next, we have a follow-up call with an Infrastructure Team Lead, Data Architect, or CDO/CIO; and they start telling me about the importance of standardization on DataDirect Data Connectivity. I initially thought these were prank calls by our marketing folks that say the same thing, but in reality it’s just a sign of our business becoming more relevant than ever before.

Let there be disruption


It’s true, Progress Software is also guilty of disruption with our new cloud platform, Progress Pacific, that includes aPaaS. But we’re also guilty of disrupting our own disruption (which makes everyone happy) by providing real-time direct ODBC/JDBC SQL access to the applications built on the RollBase aPaaS, as well as standards based data access to external sources – both directions made possible by DataDirect Cloud.

But it gets really ugly outside the zen of Progress Software. We see data silos in SaaS applications (i.e. Salesforce,Dynamics,Maketo), NoSQL (i.e. MongoDB or Cassandra); IoT (i.e. machine data); NewSQL; Graph DBs; in-Memory DBs; and of course big data. Each of these disruptive technologies brings tremendous potential and ROI if we can just avoid the disruption of data integration.

Enable the data professionals to disrupt the disruption


Let me share concrete examples related to disruptive technologies and data connectivity from real-world projects on the ground:

1. Application Platform As A Service (aPaaS) has arrived

I have worked on several projects connecting existing data infrastructure to aPaaS platforms such as Force.com and RollBase. One common use cases is for SAP Business Objects Universe to Salesforce.com data. The existing SAP BI infrastructure expects real-time SQL access to an operational data store, however many aPaaS platforms create a data silo where the database is inaccessible behind a public or private cloud. In fact we’ve been told numerous times, which I shared at Dreamforce, that DataDirect connectivity enables aPaaS adoption when organizations require operational intelligence and real-time data access. The aPaaS market is growing, and standard data connectivity to SaaS/aPaaS from DataDirect is here to disrupt that disruption for your existing systems.



2. Disruptive new system getting dumped on your team

I’m hearing this from data architects, CDOs, or CIOs from verticals such as Financial Services to Telco. The challenge is the variety of specialized data sources coming in such as IoT data in compressed formats, SaaS applications, RDBMS with machine data in Postgres or market data in Sybase, NoSQL or NewSQL databases running fraud detection, etc. Rather than hire a staff of data scientists, java developers, curl developers, etc to access data; leaders in this space are partnering with DataDirect (and our partners) to put a SQL front end on the disparate data to hit the ground running with those disruptive technologies from end to end.

Standardization from a development standpoint has been solved via ODBC and JDBC (thanks in large part to DataDirect’s professional contributions). Since SQL can still vary, one approach has been to pick a database technology (so far Oracle or SQL Server); and connect to the disruptive world through DataDirect ODBC drivers. The SQL Server Linked Server or Oracle Database Gateway technologies combined with DataDirect’s breadth of data sources provide that standard SQL front end to the disruption.

As requirements grow, DataDirect standards based connectivity is flexible for expansion outside the RDBMS technology layer for direct connectivity from ETL, data warehousing, BI, analytics, application development, etc. It makes a great addition to corporate application stores and marketplaces.

3. ISVs with disruptive technologies

If you’re an ISV building a solution without direct SQL access to the data, please consider building an ODBC drivers for all my friends in the enterprise. I really love how Netsuite provided ODBC access to their SaaS application; and how Progress Software provided standards based connectivity to RollBase on the Progress Pacific aPaaS. We’re already hearing from RollBase shops that this clears adoption hurdles for data driven organizations running Microsoft Excel/Access and BI/Data Visualization Tools.

Disrupt your day to get started disrupting the disruption


1. Download free trial of the DataDirect Connect drivers or DataDirect Cloud Service to democratize your disruptive data.

2. Or call 1-800-876-3101 to speak live with a Systems Engineer to learn more. We promise to limit saying the increasingly overused word “disruption” to 3 times on the call.

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