The dPaaS Revolution: A New Approach to Helping Businesses Extract Maximum Value from their Data

In this special guest feature, Manish Gupta of Liaison Technologies highlights a new approach called Data Platform as a Service (dPaaS) that is giving businesses a more effective, scalable and powerful model for integration and data management. Manish is the Chief Marketing Officer at Liaison Technologies where he is responsible for Product Management, Product Marketing, Corporate Marketing, Demand Generation, Analyst and Media Relations. Manish has over 20 years of experience driving corporate growth through portfolio management, brand building, demand generation and establishment of strategic alliances. Manish holds Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and a Master of Business Administration degree from Santa Clara University.

In the era of Big Data, businesses increasingly rely on data to make critical decisions. Ironically, just as we have more data and increasing variety of tools from which to derive intelligence, monetize and make better decisions from our data, accessing quality data is becoming a greater challenge. The notion of “garbage in, garbage out” can quickly turn any business intelligence and data analytics project into a disastrous failure. And with it, the risk of erroneous analysis grows exponentially as higher volumes of data from multitude of sources is produced, churned and consumed by more tools and solutions.

With the breaking up of monolithic ERP applications and the addition of disparate data sources such as social media, it is becoming increasingly challenging to contextualize, harmonize and integrate data. Comprehensive and high quality integration is crucial as companies are under growing pressure to discover actionable insights based on this broader landscape.

Legacy integration methods, like Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), are unable to keep pace. Emerging solutions like Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), essentially a DIY solution, presume that companies have the ability, resources and desire to develop integrations. This requires significant investment in maintaining the internal architecture, security, compliance and governance that keep the data flowing properly, while adding very little direct value to a company’s overall business objectives.

To resolve the challenge, a new approach called Data Platform as a Service (dPaaS) is giving businesses a more effective, scalable and powerful model for integration and data management. Designed to address the problem of data quality, dPaaS is a multi-tenant cloud-based platform that provides unified integration and data management capabilities. Integration is delivered as a fully managed service through the Center of Excellence. The enterprise maintains access and control at the data layer and end-to-end visibility of the full data lifecycle supporting governance and data quality requirements.

dPaaS relieves companies of the integration burden, gives them full control over their data and allows them to focus on extracting business insights faster, thanks to these fundamental shifts:

• Data-centric integration. Most conventional integration solutions focus on connecting individual applications and point data sources, resulting in silos that require unique maintenance efforts.. dPaaS, instead, recognizes that data has value independent of applications. It creates and persists a central, schema-less foundational data layer with the requisite metadata relationships and secure protocols to mesh with unlimited data sources. This allows organizations to easily add new applications and offers business flexibility with a schema-on-read model.
• Unification of integration and data management. Historically, these have been separate functions, despite the extremely tight operational relationship. dPaaS eliminates this separation with a unified platform. Workflows can be interlaced between integration and data management functions of the platform. This approach delivers the most efficient output for a given business process without invoking latency, security, or governance concerns. This provides agility, reduces errors, improves time to execution, etc.
• A fully managed services model. dPaaS shifts the burden of dealing with integration complexity from the organization to the platform provider. This empowers organizations to focus solely on extracting actionable insights from data, versus getting bogged down in the “plumbing” efforts. Enterprises also gain access to the provider’s expertise, through their integration center of excellence, and benefit from continued technological platform advancements (e.g. microservices, Big Data infrastructure, API management).

With its holistic approach to integration and data management, dPaaS is uniquely solving the data quality problem in the increasingly dynamic Big Data environment. By reducing integration complexity and making the process virtually seamless to the end-user, this new approach is finally giving companies the ability to fully capitalize on their data and business intelligence investments to extract maximum value and make revenue-driving decisions.

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