Corporations in the present day wish to leverage their information to help enterprise intelligence (BI) initiatives, however with out the correct information connectivity processes and instruments in place, that information may stay locked in silos. Enter the Progress DataDirect Hybrid Information Pipeline (HDP) connectivity answer, which permits firms to securely join cloud and on-premises information to BI instruments.
The HDP answer cannot solely be used to attach information internally, however will also be utilized by SaaS distributors to attach third-party information and reporting instruments to allow them to ship extra worth to their prospects.
For instance, Onit, an organization that helps firms handle their authorized workflows, was discovering that prospects usually would wish to herald their very own reporting instruments, usually requiring customized work to set it up.
Onit made an funding within the HDP answer as a method to have the ability to present extra advantages to its prospects while not having to continually construct customized integrations. Thus, Onit began working the Hybrid Information Pipeline answer in its personal setting and supplies a REST API interface—OData—to securely share hosted information with its prospects and have these prospects make the most of their very own reporting software program, defined Aaron Burg, Principal Gross sales Engineer at Progress.
“The good factor with REST APIs is you don’t must distribute something, and all of the BI instruments already know methods to interface with it routinely,” mentioned Burg.
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MHC is one other buyer that has had success with utilizing the HDP answer for connectivity. Its NorthStar doc automation platform is utilized by greater than 1,000 prospects throughout a wide range of industries, together with monetary companies, healthcare, authorities, manufacturing and retail.
MHC started utilizing HDP information connectivity about three years in the past when it constructed a cloud model of the NorthStar platform. In accordance with Tom McMahon, Senior Architect of the platform at MHC, it was straightforward for patrons who already saved their information within the cloud to change to the cloud software, however to be able to help prospects who solely maintain their information on-premises, an answer was wanted to allow the cloud software to get entry to that information.
“We determined to do a proof of idea on the Hybrid Information Pipeline answer,” McMahon mentioned. “It was easy to arrange and get it up and working. It appeared like it might handle many necessities with out quite a lot of work on our facet to combine into our system—and that’s once we determined to maneuver ahead with Progress.”
Dennis Bennett, Principal Gross sales Engineer at Progress, mentioned that quite a lot of these prospects with on-premises information are in extremely regulated industries, and so utilizing Progress’ on-premises connector supplies them with larger confidence that their information is protected.
In accordance with Bennett, the DataDirect connector is a light-weight agent that will get put in behind the shopper’s firewall after which creates connections with the cloud-hosted model of the HDP answer that MHC is working. “It’ll all be outbound connectivity, so it’ll be initiated from that agent behind the firewall,” he mentioned.
In accordance with Burg, it’s straightforward to get began with a proof of idea utilizing Progress DataDirect’s free trial, and an organization might be up and working with that in a matter of some hours.
“We offer you free pre-sales help to get it working, so there’s a low funding to strive the HDP answer and get a really feel for the way it works. You’ll be able to select one or two of your prospects and do a small pilot undertaking the place you get some suggestions from them to allow them to see that it’s helpful of their setting, and from there, you may determine if you wish to scale that out to a wider viewers,” Burg mentioned.
