Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Denodo

Denodo is betting big on the power of data partnerships in Australia and New Zealand.

The global leader in data management and integration is focusing on local collaboration as part of its ambitious growth plans. With its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Denodo now boasts a presence in 25 countries, including offices in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne, and is keen to deepen ties throughout the region.

Denodo's Executive Vice President said the company has a rich history stretching back more than two decades, originally spun out of a university with a mission to integrate structured and unstructured data from disparate sources. "Our CEO was a professor and, along with his PhD students, was very deep into data management," he explained. "They started the company with the idea of integrating structured and unstructured data in disparate sources. The company has now come a long way."

Denodo's platform is widely recognised for its unique logical-first approach to data management, built on a technology known as data virtualisation. "While there are many companies in data management, the Denodo platform takes a logical-first approach powered by a technology called data virtualisation," he said. "With that, we're able to not only integrate data in real time or near real time, but also manage a logical data model and a semantic way of presenting the data to the business."

Today, the company claims to serve approximately a thousand global customers, including some of the largest enterprises across multiple sectors.

Recent developments in Denodo's platform have focused on expanding its appeal to a broader set of users, making data more accessible and meaningful to business analysts and data scientists, not just engineers. "Some of the more recent things that we have done in the product is put a lot of emphasis on the citizen data consumers or the business analysts, the data scientists," he said. "Our data catalog has a very strong AI/ML recommendation engine – just like you would go to a first-class e-commerce site and they say, hey you bought this camera, you should buy these lenses. Similarly, we are able to recommend datasets and we believe that is increasing data democratization and consumption of data."

He also highlighted advancements in the platform's metadata management, policy-based access control, and a new massively parallel processing (MPP) engine based on Presto open source, enabling more efficient data queries. "We're now offering it as a managed service on all the three clouds," he added, describing how Denodo's technological evolution makes it more flexible and accessible to enterprise customers worldwide.

Linda Ehrlich, Denodo's ANZ Partner and Alliance Lead, believes the key to future success in the region lies in the strength of its partner ecosystem. "Denodo was very seriously into partners," she said. "We've made a huge commitment in the last four or five years."

The company's partner program includes systems integrators, resellers, cloud partners, technology partners, and now original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and embedded solutions. "We have basically three types of partners," the Executive Vice President explained. "We have our systems integration resellers, what we broadly call our go-to-market partners, our strategic and cloud partners – with the three hyperscalers you know, AWS, Azure and GCP – and technology partners as you imagine, Denodo sits in the middle of hundreds of data sources and hundreds of data consumers."

In practical terms, this means supporting partners from onboarding all the way to technical training, co-marketing, and post-sales collaboration. "On the post-sales side, our partner program focuses on what we call partner success management," he explained. "We make sure the customer adoption journey is accelerated. The same way we make sure the partner is part of what we call blended services – so customer, Denodo and partner together accelerate the customer journey."

This partnership approach in Australia and New Zealand includes global giants with a local footprint. "We have our global systems integrators where we have relationships – on this trip itself I have visited with a few of them – EY, Capgemini, Infosys, and others such as Deloitte," he said. "Of course, the relationship is global, but it's localised here with partners and practices, and the verticals that they like to focus on."

There is particular excitement about partnerships related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) areas. "We're having some very strong conversations around a partner in the ESG area," he added. "That's important because you have a large resources, mining, transportation, logistics business where ESG is very important."

Local partners are equally important, including firms with strong presences in Canberra and within the Australian government, as well as an increasing number of boutique and specialist data-centric firms. "We invite other partners who are curious about the program to contact us because we are in full-blown recruitment mode right now to try and build this community out and make it as effective as possible," Ehrlich said.

Denodo's leaders are clear about the kinds of partnerships they seek. "What has worked very well to kind of open the market or kind of be innovative – because we're a very innovative technology – our very data focused partners – data, AI, analytics, etc.," said the Executive Vice President. "They understand the challenges of what I would call traditional data integration – which is moving the data, copying the data, replicating the data – and they kind of felt the pain and so they've they can articulate that."

Mid-sized and growing companies with a strong data focus are particularly encouraged, alongside large global integrators and smaller specialist boutiques. Unique offerings are also welcomed. He described meeting "a husband and wife couple – one person comes from a communication, how the government initiatives and ministries need to deliver public policy, and the husband was the technical person – together they're delivering a combination of services."

For those interested in collaborating, Ehrlich recommends starting the conversation. "I really invite people to come forward and find out, do a discovery session with us," she said. She adds that even companies with traditional integration backgrounds or those working with popular data analytics platforms can find value with Denodo.

"We're not there to displace any strategy they may have around a data lake or a warehouse – we are in the middle, as we say, and we are surfacing information and democratizing that data," she said. "Come and discover what we do, ask us to explain what we do, even if we don't become, you know, formalised partners and go to market together, we can facilitate those collaborations with some of our partners so you can jointly go to market."

She concluded, "So I think there's a lot on the roadmap for us in Australia and New Zealand – with some new announcements coming out, and we invite other partners who are curious about the program to contact us because we are in full-blown recruitment mode right now to try and build this community out and make it as effective as possible."