Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Denodo?

Data is everywhere - and one company is aiming to help organisations make sense of it all. Denodo, a global data integration and management specialist, has been making waves in the Australasian market as industry after industry seeks better ways to unify and use their ever-growing data stores.

Speaking exclusively to 10 Minute IT Jams, Ravi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer of Denodo, shared his insights into the challenges businesses face, and how the company's data virtualisation solutions are helping customers tackle them head on.

"Denodo is a data integration and data management company," Shankar began. "We have been around for the last 20 years, we're a global company. We have offices in about 18 different countries and hundreds of customers across the world and across about 30 plus different industries."

Denodo's main focus is on helping large, complex organisations solve their thorniest data headaches. "The key problem that we solve is our customers are basically over a billion dollars in revenue - very large, global 500 customers," explained Shankar. "Because of the complexity of the business, they have the data kind of spread across multiple different departments and we basically help integrate the data together and deliver it to the business users."

Whereas conventional data integration involves copying data into a central store, Denodo takes a different approach. "We approach it from a perspective called data virtualisation," said Shankar. "Data virtualisation is a real-time data integration without having to store the data in an intermediate repository, so it is very quick in delivering the data to the business users."

He continued, "Many of our customers prefer that and the ability to also integrate structured with unstructured - whether it is cloud, on-premises - and for the business users to use. That's basically what Denodo does."

To illustrate the difference, Shankar painted a picture of today's data landscape. "You have to think about the data being very disparate across multiple different sources and the types of data actually differ," he said. "We talk about the variety of the data - the data could be unstructured, it could be structured, it could be semi-structured somewhere in between."

The velocity, or speed at which data arrives, is another challenge. "Sometimes data is at rest... In other cases, like streaming data, which is really fast," he explained. The third challenge is location: "A lot of the data is on premises, but most of the data is actually getting onto the cloud these days, so the data could be anywhere."

Business users, Shankar said, "just have one place to go and ask for the data without having to worry about where the data is actually coming from." Denodo's platform "presents the data in a normalised format which means it's in a format that is readily consumable by the business users - they don't have to worry about it, and the data is real-time. We do not actually store the data in between. When the business users request the data, we actually go down to the sources and fetch the data, so the data is as fresh as it can be."

Crucially, this approach separates business and IT concerns. "It basically separates the business from the IT. The business users really don't care where the data comes from, but the IT has the charter to actually evolve the data and modernise the infrastructure," Shankar said. This means IT departments can migrate from on-premises to the cloud without disrupting users.

Denodo's technology is already being used by prominent organisations across Australia and New Zealand in a broad range of sectors. "We have a varied set of customers such as RMIT, Silver Chain... in the education space, in the healthcare space, we also have in the mining space companies that are actually using our product," he revealed.

In higher education, the pandemic has forced rapid decision-making. "They are trying to make effective decisions, especially these days with the coronavirus being hit... how they can actually make quick decisions about whether to reopen the schools, for example, and what kind of courses they need to offer online, which ones should be in a hybrid format. They need to be able to track the students... all these require data that comes from the admission system, from the faculty system... Where the data needs to come together, we enable a single view of the students, the faculty, and make that available to the administrators," Shankar said.

Healthcare is another area of impact. "They actually use it to understand, at the point of care, the history of a particular patient," he said. Patient records are scattered across multiple systems - clinics, ERs, laboratories and dispensing - but Denodo's solution brings these together for a unified patient view, which "enables care at that particular point."

The mining sector, too, benefits, with Denodo helping companies gather and join together data from sensors and operational systems. "We're able to gather that information, integrate it with other information about where the machine is, who owns it... and provide that information to the business users who can make predictive capabilities," said Shankar, such as servicing a machine ahead of time or ordering spare parts proactively.

For Denodo, the ANZ region is a strategic market. "We have been addressing the ANZ region indirectly for many years now," Shankar revealed, with early work for government customers through partners. "But having seen the demand, we actually opened our own direct offices - it's been about three plus years, I would actually say. We have quite a few sales and marketing people in the ANZ region and that is actually continuing to grow for us. We started first in Australia, now we have kind of expanded to New Zealand. We have actually invested a lot of money in terms of our promotion and marketing aspects. So we have actually invested very heavily and we are seeing some good response."

As business demand for unified, accessible data continues to rise, Denodo's virtualisation platform offers a compelling answer for organisations seeking agility and speed. "It was nice talking to you," concluded Shankar.