Among the obstacles organisations encounter on their journey towards being data-driven is the problem of data silos.
This was noted by Petr Nemeth, CEO and founder of automated, no-code integration platform Dataddo, in an interview with ITWeb.
For organisations, being data-driven or following a data-driven approach means culturally treating data as a strategic asset and making decisions based on data instead of intuition.
Nemeth comments that what tends to happen is that data is scattered across the multiple applications within an organisation.
While this may be considered good because it creates great productivity tools for the organisation, at the same time, it has an embedded problem, he states.
For example, information about the client is in one system, information about payments is in another system and information about marketing activities in another system, and so forth.
As a result, Nemeth’s company Dataddo decided to roll out a free data integration plan, which it describes as a no-investment way for any professional, regardless of technical skill, to access and start working with data from disparate sources.
Previously, organisations needed to make a considerable investment in data infrastructure, he notes. It was extremely expensive for developers to create these connections and build these connections, with a lot of investment required for the data warehouse and data stack.
Says the CEO: “We created a platform which allows you to easily connect to all those different applications where you have the data and send the data to whichever destination you’d want.
“The Dataddo platform is designed for non-technical business professionals. But it’s also incredibly friendly to engineers because it allows them to tap into low-level platform operations via an API if they need to.
“We’ve created a simple tool of getting the data where you have it, to where the data should be for you to make a better analysis.”
Mission-critical compliance
With its origins in Prague, Dataddo is headquartered in Silicon Valley, serving more than 17 000 organisations and individuals from over 100 countries.
It counts Twitter, Ogilvy, Uber Eats, the French Football Federation, the Dallas Stars and Emirates NBD among its clients.
Referencing a survey by New Vantage Partners, Dataddo indicates that 97% of leading companies across industries have been investing in data initiatives, for at least the last five years. However, only 26.5% of these companies claim to actually be data-driven.
For Dataddo, its newly-launched platform aims to help businesses overcome these obstacles by making it easier for them to share data and familiarise employees with visualisation tools before investing in paid tools.
In larger companies, the plan can also be used to test the validity of any data model on a small scale before deploying it fully in a data warehouse.
Commenting on why the company devised its free data integration plan, Nemeth states: “The reason for it is that companies are these days becoming more and more data-driven. If you want the company to be data-driven, you have to start working with the data and this problem of disperse data is a big challenge. Therefore, we feel this is a good opportunity for every customer to make their journey of being data-driven easier.”
As a cloud-based platform, it means South African organisations are also able to use it, according to Nemeth.
In addition, Dataddo’s new plan is compliant with SA’s data privacy law, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), he states.
“We’ve made specific effort to ensure that even if it’s a cloud service, that it’s fully compliant with the South African environment. We are POPIA compliant, which is the privacy standard similar to GDPR in Europe. We also guarantee that the data processing and data storage is happening on South African soil.”
Data evangelist
Explaining the rationale behind making the plan free, Nemeth indicates it is essentially for the client’s benefit, and for Dataddo to be the chosen partner should an organisation want to scale and add more data sources.
“It’s really important to make some sort of market evangelism because we believe that at some point – and we see this from the perspective of some of our existing customers – there’s a really strong productivity boost when the company becomes data-driven.
“Of course, it has a lot of stages but typically, a couple of years ago, being data-driven meant a very strong investment and strong commitment. For us, we really want to make sure we are some sort of evangelist when it comes to this data-driven approach.
“Therefore, we want to give an initial toolset that is for free. At the same time, we give the basic tools so that everybody can start their data journey with us.”
Nemeth concludes that the plan aims to enable organisations to handle data more efficiently, to be data-driven.
“For example, you have a single dashboard where you can see all the important data about your organisation. Based on that, you can make any immediate decision and this is something that makes a company more efficient.”
Share