Blog: Krish Krishnan

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DaaS - Data integration simplified

Look at the market, as I'm writing this blog, the DOW is below 10,000 points and there is a widespread fear on the global credit crisis. We (a few independent industry analysts) have been saying that BI is relatively on safe ground till this point. Now it is time to stop, take a deep breath and then start moving, that is this mantra that all companies are beginning to take as a step.

On Wall street we have seen the fall of major investment banks and the big brands have now been bought out or merged into other entities. The spate of M&A activities is not all said and done. With all these turbulent times, the need for a lower cost data integration service is becoming a thought that will cross many minds.

One of the ways to mitigate the risk while providing value is to implement Data as a Service (DaaS), to build a quick data integration layer. This approach while keeping cost down, will enable scalability and flexibility.

A survey conducted by B-EYE Network found that even after less than a year in the North American market, 23% of the people who responded were aware of DaaS specifically, and that 40% were aware of on-demand business analytics; 15% said they’d be willing to implement DaaS at their companies.

Why DaaS? there are several reasons and I will mention a couple

1. You cannot integrate all the data into your data warehouse overnight, but the Executives demand a dashboard that can show them data across the integrated enterprise.

2. There is data in the new merger or acquisition that needs to be verified and validated, and then transformed to integrate, but you do not have the hardware and the bandwidth to perform this activity.

One company that comes to my mind is Kognitio, which specifically deals with the DaaS solution set for the Data Warehouse. They have a plethora of options and offerings which can easily fit into the Insurance and Financial sectors specifically. You can check them out at their website "www.kognitio.com".

You can deploy the DaaS architecture internally or externally. My opinion is that large organizations will deploy it internally and smaller companies can use the external services. Data is an asset for the organization and hence the data security and compliance needs will need to be considered before sending the data externally.

DaaS is the way to go for data warehousing rather than the cloud.

There are other methods to achieve this kind of scalability with offerings from Dataupia, Vertica, ParAccel and AsterData, we will look at those in the next series of my blogs.

I have omitted the Oracle-HP database machine due to its newness to the market.

Teradata, Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server are all in all these organizations already and the key issue is to integrate them with ease. These are source systems and enterprise platforms which are the underlying infrastructure today.

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