Striim: Streaming fresh data, with in-flight transformation, to better support the age of insight!

As we look at the calendar and watch the year wind down, it is an inescapable fact that 2020 has been so different from what we expected as we celebrated the beginning of a new year with bright lights, champagne and big wishes for our future. Having said this, it’s also timely to think back on the words of HPE CEO, Antonio Neri, when he declared that as 2020 progressed we were ending the era of information even as we were beginning the era of insight. Easy to say, of course, but fraught with the potential for many missteps as we navigate a path out of traditional and legacy processes to where we can embrace new ways of transforming the data we have into meaningful and actionable information.

Earlier this year CRN came out with its Coolest Management And Integration Tool Companies of the 2020 Big Data 100 and Striim made the list for the fifth year in a row. Striim is a proud HPE Nonstop technology partner providing enterprise-grade cloud data integration solutions. Striim enables online migrations and real-time continuous data movement through log-based Change-Data-Capture (CDC), helping enterprise customers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

It has been covered numerous times this year but the reference to NonStop being the systems where data is created cannot be ignored. It is in this context that Striim’s ability to ingest high-volume, high-velocity enterprise data together with Striim performing in-flight data processing including transformations that should strike a chord with many NonStop customers. Once Striim ingests the source data in real time and non-intrusively, the data is delivered to the target(s) in the immediately consumable form, quickly and with sub-second latency. It is also in this context that we return to the topic of the era of insight – without timely data enriched in ways that benefit data analytics processes, NonStop customers’ ability to gain actionable insights may be marginalized.

As we recall the words of HPE CEO Neri at this year’s HPE annual conference, as reported by CRN in its update, Antonio Neri’s 10 Boldest Statements from HPE Discover Virtual:

“The next decade must be about insights and discoveries that are shared and elevate the greater well-being of every human being on this planet. Today we are entering the age of insight.

“The age of insight requires new principles and priorities for digital transformation. The focus is to build an edge to cloud platform that connects, protects, analyzes and acts on all of your data and brings agility to your apps to unlock your enterprise’s full potential.”

Industry has been promoting the concept of digital transformation (DX) for some time even as many have tended to associate such transformations with the arrival of cloud computing. In the context of Neri’s comments, transformation is a reference to this concept but drilling down deeper into the concept of digital transformation and it’s hard to ignore the importance of data. A transformation of the business, of IT itself, begs the question – are we doing enough to transform and enrich the data in ways whereby the business itself is transformed?

In the latest blog post to the Striim web site, Types of Data Integration: ETL vs ELT and Batch vs Real Time,  Striim’s Growth Officer John Kutay begins with references to just how important data has become to all looking to provide business with greater insights:

“More than 80% of respondents in an IBM study said that the sources, the volume, and the velocity of data they work with had increased.

“So it comes as no surprise that companies are eager to take advantage of these trends; the World Economic Forum’s report lists data analysts and scientists as the most in-demand job role across industries in 2020.

“Not only are most analysts forced to work with unreliable and outdated data, but many also lack tools to quickly integrate data from different sources into a unified view. Traditional batch data integration is hardly up to this challenge.”

In considering the merits of both ETL (extract, transform, load) and ELT (extract, load, transform) it’s clear that with the volume and velocity of data, the merits of ETL come to the fore just as we know that from a NonStop customer’s perspective, real-time access to data is preferable to data that is only updated, transformed and integrated in batch. With an acknowledgment of the value proposition that comes from deploying Striim, Kutay than directs our attention to:

“One solution is real-time data integration, a technology superior to batch methods because it enables rapid decision-making, breaks down data silos, future-proofs your business, and offers many other benefits.

“Real-time data integration involves processing and transferring data as soon as it’s collected. The process isn’t literally instantaneous, though. It takes a fraction of a second to transfer, transform, and analyze data using change data capture (CDC), transform-in-flight, and other technologies.”

“In many situations, however, data needs to be delivered in a specific format. That’s where the transform-in-flight feature comes into play as it turns data that’s in motion into a required format and enriches it with inputs from other sources.”

According to Kutay, ultimately it’s all about optimizing business productivity. In the age of insight, recognition is given to the desire of business to remain competitive and more basic still in these difficult times, stay in business. Striim, with its data streaming platform that continuously ingests data from numerous sources, including NonStop systems, performs in-flight data processing including transformations, all in a product that is simple to install and deploy, ensures any NonStop system can provide meaningful contributions to any businesses’ entry into the age of insight!

Should you have any questions for Striim as a result of reading this article then please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, the Striim team. We would be only too happy to hear from you.

Ferhat Hatay, Ph.D.

Sr. Director of Partnership and Alliances, Striim, Inc.