DATA INTEGRATION: Top 5 Best Practices

The explosion in information technology tools and capability has accelerated. Our information technology environment is moving at absolute light-speed. Yet the back of data integration is broken. 90% of the customers are using 20 year old ETL technology designed to move batch files into the data warehouse at 1 am. It is a manual process. Worst of all, is that some vendors have even put this 20 year old technology in their newly minted 1 year old cloud. Who wants 20 year old technology in a 1 year old cloud?

To add insult to injury, data quality is … “another product.” I humbly submit that without resolving data quality issues and providing for their ongoing maintenance you cannot integrate even two applications, load your data warehouse, consider a future Virtual MDM deployment.

The cause of this is simple. Look at the revenue mix for the two major vendors that control the market for large enterprise. Their business is about professional services – not software tools. They are in business to sell you, their customer, as much professional services at the highest rates you can imagine. Legacy ETL technology is a bonanza to a company that sells your company services by the hour.

Even worse, they don’t offer you the right mix of services and technology. The integration was done to specification but it doesn’t seem to work. I guess we’ll just have to sell you additional consulting to do the data quality clean-up.

The five best practices in data integration break this model. We turn the model upside down. By using advanced data virtualization, and pushing back at the legacy monopoly attached to your wallet, you can reduce your costs and speed your time to implementation.

BEST PRACTICE #1: Use an Automated Metadata Discovery Tool and Data Dictionary. IEEE did a seminal study recently in the area of data integration to understand how the time was allocated. Over 40%+ of the time in any data integration project is spent on discovery. What is the structure of the data? Which field corresponds to others so that we can identify the source record of truth and harmonize it over to the target? Advanced data virtualization can completely automate the discovery of data structures, provides insight into how things relate (semantics) and then automates the integration between the systems. All of this is automated and easy to deploy. You will be able to reduce your time, in this project phase alone, by 75% or more because you use a metadata discovery tool.

BEST PRACTICE #2: Data Quality Must Be Integrated At Every Step in Your Project. Data quality is an essential project component for a small, medium or large company. Not a separate project. Advanced data virtualization technology provides full data quality tool sets, fully automated, with the product. It is the starting point to any data integration, the core to best practices implementation and the ongoing steady hand that keep your data harmonization working into the future. Without good data quality, each data harmonization will reject hundreds to thousands of records that “don’t synchronize.” And this creates tons of additional work.

BEST PRACTICE #3: Understand Your Needs Versus Vendor Architecture. “Tomorrow never comes” is not the right way to deploy critical applications that serve your business. Advanced data virtualization brings a hub and spoke architecture that easily extends and adds the next application to your integration architecture. This is in sharp contrast to the pipe (or pipe and hub for mdm) architectures you must assemble with ETL.

BEST PRACTICE #4: Bring in Tools Suitable For Business Users – No Programming Required. Advanced data virtualization enables your business user to point, click and select to build out integrations. Data transformations between systems come together using a formula builder very similar to Microsoft® Excel® – highly intuitive and obvious. This works the same with relational data, objects, complex API’s with products like SAP®, XML and even NoSQL data sources. One simple object framework designed to work with everything – fast, easy and automated.

BEST PRACTICE #5: Data Enrichment is Easy – Automate It For Business Benefit. Today products like D&B360® and others offer clean data sources for many elements of your important customer data. Yet most of our customers are still manually correcting data at the time of data entry in the ERP system, and then hoping that the support and SFA systems catch up. There is a better way – you can harmonize data directly with a source of data enrichment using business rules. This improves business process and provides strong ROI.

Contact sales@queplix.com

Data Virtualization Meets ETL

Queplix Wednesday put a couple of tools on the market that are supposed to make it easier, quicker and cheaper to move data to the cloud.

Its new VirtualETL and CloudETL lines bring data virtualization to usually thorny extract, transform and load (ETL) tasks and are supposed to cut the time required to connect applications a good 75% compared to traditional ETL methodologies.

Queplix CEO Mark Cashman says using data virtualization for ETL “changes everything; ETL teams can mix any combination of relational, object, cloud or XML-based applications. And they don’t need to use SQL to set up connectivity, define the transforms, tune data quality or get the integration into production. We’ve essentially turned the cost model upside down, lowering product costs and dramatically reducing set-up costs.”

 

The widgetry, which requires no coding, lets users configure Queplix’ Application Software Blades to automatically connect to target applications like SalesForce.com, Netsuite, Taleo, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP ERP.

The VirtualETL family includes enterprise-class VirtualETL, which connects any two enterprise applications together, and professional-class VirtualETL, which lets users connect any two applications that use RDBMS systems.

With CloudETL, users can connect any two cloud-based applications or connect a cloud-based application with one that’s not cloud-based.

Pricing ranges from $9,999-$19,999. There are monthly pricing models available to fit cloud and SaaS deployment budgets.

The company says the stuff provides an easily audited view of the entire transform lineage.

 

© 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.

 

Queplix Update: CRM and Data Integration

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 18, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Queplix™ Corp., a leader in data virtualization, will host a free webinar titled Improve Customer Service and Increase Customer Retention on October 20, 2010 at 10 a.m. pacific daylight time. Featuring The 451 Group research director Sean Hackett and Michael Zuckerman, chief marketing officer of Queplix, the webinar will address how organizations can empower their support teams with the integrated customer relationship management (CRM) systems they need to resolve customer issues faster and better, improve quality of service, increase customer retention, and lower costs.

“With CRM increasingly moving to the cloud, organizations face a new set of requirements that demand rapid integration of their on-premise customer support systems with cloud-based systems such as Salesforce®,” said Sean Hackett, Research Director, The 451 Group. “Next generation data virtualization technologies can enable this much needed rapid integration, while helping customers achieve the return on investment they seek from better customer service and increased customer retention.”

The October 20th webinar is part of a series presented by Queplix that expands on the advantages of new data virtualization technology and how it can increase business value in areas such as CRM. To register for the Queplix webinar, visit: Improve Customer Service and Increase Customer Retention.

For more about next generation data virtualization technology, download a free white paper at: The Power of Data Virtualization: Changing the Face of Data Integration and Data Management.

About Sean Hackett, The 451 Group

Sean Hackett has more than a decade of experience as an IT industry analyst and consultant. Throughout his career, he has closely tracked the evolution of the IT services industry. Prior to The 451 Group, Hackett worked in CA Inc’s Corporate Planning and Strategy organization as a Senior Principal. In this role, he supported the company’s executive leadership team and board of directors in identifying and investigating new strategic opportunities.

Queplix Webinar: Pitfalls of Traditional Master Data Management

 Queplix™ Corp., a leader in data virtualization, will host a free webinar titled, Thinking of Master Data Management? Don’t Do It, on October 12, 2010 at 10 a.m. pacific time. The webinar will examine where today’s paradigm for master data management (MDM) falls short, involving unnecessary risk, excessive costs and long implementation intervals, and how companies can avoid these pitfalls with a new and improved approach that dramatically saves time and money.

“New, highly automated data virtualization solutions are shifting the current model of master data management to the benefit of customers,” said Michael Zuckerman, Chief Marketing Officer for Queplix. “This new approach provides tremendous cost advantages and economies of scale for organizations of all sizes. SMB, mid-tier, divisional and line of business entities cannot afford to wait several years for return on investment. You can start by integrating just a few key applications and grow from there, at low risk and at very low cost. We expect a strong and enthusiastic response when participants learn they can implement data management in just weeks, deploy on more cost-effective platforms, and receive return on investment in less than a year from project start.”

Mark Cashman, Chief Executive Officer for Queplix, noted, “Our Data Harmonization™ gets operational systems synchronized during the course of a simple integration. There is no need to develop common data models that create tremendous delay and require everyone to change the way they do business. Queplix Virtual Data Manager™ takes your existing data models and automatically creates metadata that immediately integrates and harmonizes your key customer, product and financial information.”

The October 12 webinar presented by Queplix is part of a series that will expand on the advantages of data virtualization and how it can increase business value in areas such as customer relationship management (CRM).

To register for the Queplix webinar, go to: Thinking of Master Data Management? Don’t Do It!

Data virtualization enables companies to automatically and securely integrate cloud, SaaS and on-premise applications with speed and simplicity. This benefits application areas like customer relationship management (CRM), where cloud-based solutions such as SalesForce.com® require integration and ongoing data harmonization with on-premise applications – PeopleSoft®, Siebel®, SAP® enterprise resource planning (ERP) and many others. Queplix solutions can be implemented to enable consistent views and manageability of this vital information in days versus months. As a result, customers achieve far greater agility, cost savings and rapid return on their investment than with alternative technologies.

Improve Customer Service & Increase Customer Retention

Get SalesForce™, Siebel™, PeopleSoft™ and SAP™ Applications and Data Working Together

Give your customer support teams the integrated CRM systems they need to improve quality of service, increase customer retention and resolve open issues quicker and at lower costs.

• Learn about ways to rapidly achieve single consistent view to your customer data and how it can be easily achieved across these different systems easily and automatically for your customer service, sales and marketing team.
• Learn about easy and fast solutions for cloud integration with your on-premise systems so that CRM all works together to service sales, marketing, customer support and Your Customer better. 
• Learn how to integrate these applications and their data in just a few hours and then automatically maintain synchronization between the various data sources going forward.
• Show me the Money!  Learn how you can save a lot of money by spending so little.  New solutions bring strong savings so important in this tough economy. 
• See the Demo!  A picture is worth a thousand words.

Register <CLICK HERE> for this webinar with guest Cloud Research Director Sean Hackett from the independent IT analyst firm The 451 Group as he shares practical guidance on the benefits and challenges of integrating various CRM architectures and introduces the next important wave to change everything for customer service  – data virtualization.