Firms at present wish to leverage their knowledge to assist enterprise intelligence (BI) initiatives, however with out the correct knowledge connectivity processes and instruments in place, that knowledge might stay locked in silos. Enter the Progress DataDirect Hybrid Information Pipeline (HDP) connectivity answer, which permits corporations to securely join cloud and on-premises knowledge to BI instruments.
The HDP answer can’t solely be used to attach knowledge internally, however can be utilized by SaaS distributors to attach third-party knowledge and reporting instruments to allow them to ship extra worth to their prospects.
For instance, Onit, an organization that helps corporations handle their authorized workflows, was discovering that prospects typically would wish to herald their very own reporting instruments, typically requiring customized work to set it up.
Onit made an funding within the HDP answer as a manner to have the ability to present extra advantages to its prospects while not having to continuously construct customized integrations. Thus, Onit began working the Hybrid Information Pipeline answer in its personal surroundings and supplies a REST API interface—OData—to securely share hosted knowledge 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 great factor with REST APIs is you don’t need to distribute something, and all of the BI instruments already know how one can interface with it robotically,” 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 quite a lot of industries, together with monetary providers, healthcare, authorities, manufacturing and retail.
MHC started utilizing HDP knowledge 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 simple for patrons who already saved their knowledge within the cloud to modify to the cloud software, however with a purpose to assist prospects who solely maintain their knowledge on-premises, an answer was wanted to allow the cloud software to get entry to that knowledge.
“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 seemed like it might deal with many necessities with out plenty of work on our facet to combine into our system—and that’s after we determined to maneuver ahead with Progress.”
Dennis Bennett, Principal Gross sales Engineer at Progress, mentioned that plenty of these prospects with on-premises knowledge are in extremely regulated industries, and so utilizing Progress’ on-premises connector supplies them with higher confidence that their knowledge is secure.
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’s going to all be outbound connectivity, so it’ll be initiated from that agent behind the firewall,” he mentioned.
In accordance with Burg, it’s simple to get began with a proof of idea utilizing Progress DataDirect’s free trial, and an organization may very well be up and working with that in a matter of some hours.
“We offer you free pre-sales assist to get it working, so there’s a low funding to attempt the HDP answer and get a really feel for the way it works. You may select one or two of your prospects and do a small pilot venture the place you get some suggestions from them to allow them to see that it’s helpful of their surroundings, and from there, you possibly can determine if you wish to scale that out to a wider viewers,” Burg mentioned.
