Complete Data Management: Data Governance, Analytics, and Data Integration All in One
“It’s time to more aggressively pursue holistic Data Management,” commented David Friedland, IRI VP of Business Development. “Marshalling all your data together in a centralised area so that everyone whose activities require access to it can perform their work in a less siloed and more shared way,” is the message from IRI. IRI is well-known for its CoSort Data Manipulation and Transformation solution and is the default engine in its Voracity technology, the total Data Management Platform originally announced at the end of 2015.
IRI’s most recent effort around the Voracity platform was its announcement in late March 2017 of a partnership with AnalytiX DS. AnalytiX patrons will benefit from IRI’s cost-effective ETL operations, as well as its sensitive data masking, data cleansing, test data generation, embedded Business Intelligence and data blending functions, together with its metadata-driven automation and release management, while AnalytiX will provide Voracity customers access to its metadata-enabled Data Governance, Data Lineage and Data Quality capabilities.
As the new flagship offering for IRI, Voracity is the foundation upon which the company wants to bring myriad data worlds together; i.e. those of Database Administrators, Data Warehouse Operators, BI Analysts, Data Governance Officers, Data Architects and Data Scientists. It sets out to achieve that with a consolidated approach to discovering, automatically classifying and applying rules to data, and integrating, migrating and analysing it.
“That saves time and money versus buying specialty software tools,” added Friedland. “It lets people with different roles in an organisation connect to all different data sources, define targets, securely manage data through the lifecycle and do what they need to do with it, alone or together.”
And with the specialisation that AnalytiX brings in the way of compatible modules based on API-level integration of Metadata, it becomes possible to more rapidly assess the quality or sensitivity of data for streamlining Data Governance and for offering more granular control over who can access what data and what they can do with it, such as making changes. (Voracity does, on its own, include identity-based access management and workflow authorisation to help keep every data operation, and everyone involved in it, straight and honest, too). Automated data mappings and code building means you can stand up Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and data migration environments in weeks, not months, according to IRI.
Looking Ahead
There are a variety of areas that Friedland said IRI is considering diving into as it further enhances Voracity. One goal is front-ending more of its back-end Data Quality capabilities by way of making them more graphical than they already are. Some of its seven or eight Data Quality operations already leverage wizards from its GUI and the goal is to create some more so that users won’t have to rely on scripts or dialogues to express data quality functionality.
Another area, he says, is to do more around Master Data Management (MDM). Some capabilities already exist, but IRI would like to grow Voracity’s maturity here to be more responsive to its customers’ specific needs, if not necessarily to lead the market. Other, bigger players, he notes, have been able to accrue MDM capabilities and build out at a faster pace, but we want to take time and make we are more responsive to specific customer requests and that features will be tightly integrated into our whole infrastructure.
Voracity is finding a market among a wide audience, from CIOs at medium-size businesses that can’t afford to contemplate cutting six- or seven figure checks to budget-conscious CIOs of bigger businesses. Recently it gained as a customer a department in one of the world’s leading consultancy and financial advisory firms that wants to do various greenfield projects that require its capabilities for analysis, reporting, ETL and in other areas.
“We can be their one-stop shop for Data Management,” concluded Friedland. “They pay a low entry and get access to a lot of different capabilities they would otherwise buy separately or go through a mega-vendor to get, and this department didn’t want to spend that kind of money when they figured they didn’t have to.”
SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the Open Systems segment of the IT industry, is the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines (IRI).
For more information, please contact Chris Anderson of SPI Group Pty Ltd on 011 234 1560 or fax 011 234 1387; email chris@spi.co.za or visit our website www.spi.co.za
