Highlights from the 2017 DataDirect Partner Summit

Every year, leading software vendors attend our Partner Summit to learn how to handle data connectivity in an increasingly hybrid cloud/on-premises world. 

The annual DataDirect Partner Summit, where we give our technology partners a jumpstart on their product roadmaps, is absolutely my favorite time of the year. It’s a geek fest and I love it!

This year's DataDirect Partner Summit took place on March 13 in San Jose, California. To build on the 2016 summit—where we shifted the analytics industry—this year’s summit brought together our product experts along with the top talent from the analytics and data management technology industry.

Sharing our experience with today’s breadth of data sources gives our partners unique insight into what will work, what won’t and what needs to happen for them to deliver support for the data sources that matter to their customers and prospects. It’s also an opportunity for partners to accelerate their roadmaps, optimize engineering resources and network with other vendors facing similar challenges. 

Data Challenges Faced by ISVs

Today’s ISVs face several data challenges, including:

• SaaS applications such as Eloqua, Oracle Service Cloud, VeevaCRM and Google Analytics are creating a variety of new data silos and access to each is proprietary and perplexing
• The big data ecosystem is under continual disruption—Hadoop, Spark, Hive and assorted distributions
• A new breed of fit-for-purpose databases such as MongoDB is emerging rapidly and IoT, Next Best Offer and advanced analytics are driving the need for more in-memory databases
• New platforms are driving a switch from ETL to ELT
• Increased data security vulnerabilities, penalties and regulations are creating new challenges and opportunities for data integration 
  

While these obstacles are real, there are also tangible ways to address them. The following is what we talked about this year to tackle these challenges.

Hybrid Data Pipeline for Cloud Deployments

This session was led by Dipak Patel (Principal Product Manager) and Mark Biamonte (Senior Architect). Many of our partners’ customers have on-premises data and a mix of on-premises and SaaS sources. Our job is to make their lives easier so they don’t have to worry about all those permutations and combinations. One way we do this is with the recently launched Progress DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline, which gives our partners the ability to expose a common OData protocol over a variety of data stores and firewall-friendly connectivity to on-premises data, as well as the ability to host the services themselves.

At the summit, we gave our partners an overview of how other vendors are distributing this technology for open analytics strategies or as data gateways for cloud and on-premises data sources.

We also shared our vision with partners so we can better align with their product roadmaps and talk about where we’re heading with enhancements such as failover and load balancing, new data source support, a new user management interface, hierarchical tenant management and OData v4 support.

2017: The Year of Security

Dion Picco (general manager) led the Roadmap session, which we cannot disclose publicly. However, security reigned king and was the source of some lively discussion. Themes in the product roadmap include security features required by the world’s largest organizations, the importance of having a trusted partner in the industry and what we’re doing to proactively address vulnerabilities.

Industry REST API Debate: OData vs. GraphQL vs. ORDS

In this session, Jeff Leinbach (principal software engineer, aka #dontbejeff) and I gave an overview of the various standards around REST APIs that we hear about and translated the research into only what our partners might care about. Areas of research included open standards and technologies available for querying data. We also contrasted the features and capabilities of each API, provided code examples for each and provided our recommendation for which one to adopt for analytics and data management.

Exclusive Partner View into Our Metrics and Statistics

In this session, we pretended each partner acquired Progress to become one company whose success depends on each other, which is effectively the Progress philosophy around partnership. Thus, our product team shared insights and stories from the data we’ve collected in a Hadoop Data Lake from thousands of evaluations of our products and what it means for our partners. We also shared data source rankings, popular tools, costs for different marketing strategies, popular cloud infrastructure deployments and insights from our annual data connectivity survey.

Didn’t Attend? What You Can Do Now

If you’re a Progress DataDirect partner and want to learn how to implement modern data access strategies around cloud and big data, please contact an account representative to request the materials covered.

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