Striim: When business insights are needed, business intelligence acting on fresh data makes all the difference in the world!

“Do you care enough to give me your heart and soul
Or are you just digging for gold”
– Digging for Gold, Chris Gaines

Today’s business analytics are at the very heart of the creation of business intelligence that in turn lead to directing our attention to the kind of insights business leaders are looking for to stay in business and to compete more effectively in today’s markets. The industry has been comparing data to the value propositions inherent in gold and oil but those comparisons can only go so far. Once refined and processed, gold and oil represent finished products forever changed by the process. While there can be recycling, gold and oil has lost its original composition. Not so with data where business can keep returning to data in the full knowledge that it’s as first captured.

There is no denying that the business intelligence we find most useful is getting data from the source, in real time. For the NonStop community, the data being created in real time is viewed as being fresh. Sometimes there is only milliseconds between the time the data is created on NonStop and when it is ingested by business intelligence processes. This takes any business to a place where the resultant information is timely and capable of driving meaningful decisions of value to the business. Gaining an insight into changing market conditions can prove problematic if what is being viewed is weeks or even months old – opportunities for the business are possibly long gone.

Striim provides a platform for data integration for the NonStop community. Capable of consuming data in real time, Striim continuously delivers NonStop data to business intelligent platforms, playing “a vital role in becoming a data-driven company. They enable companies to derive insights from historical and real-time data.” This is the message of the February 16, 2021, post to the Striim blog, How Data Integration Platforms Scale Business Intelligence. Striim’s director of Product Growth, John Kutay, addresses the relationship that exists between data, business intelligence and where it proves most valuable in fueling greater business insights automatically and reliably.

According to Kutay, it is very much about the data. And the fresher the data, the greater the value it provides:

BI tools that analyze data from only some of these sources aren’t helpful. And waiting days, weeks, or even months to make sense of information is unacceptable as well. Market opportunities quickly pass by. What BI tools need are effective data integration solutions that continuously deliver data in a consumable format. 

Real-time data integration can also help companies speed their business intelligence operations by continuously replicating all their data to their respective cloud BI tool. While traditional data integration tools can slow down business intelligence operations, real-time data integration platforms allow companies to accelerate their insights.

Striim has been at the center of the streaming data integration. It’s streaming data integration platform accesses data from many popular sources, including NonStop SQL and Enscribe databases. Striim can deliver to many data warehouses and lakes as well as directly into processes performing business intelligence. Striim can deliver data created on NonStop to Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, and Snowflake whether the requirement is support for a simple lift-and-shift database migration, integration with a cloud database such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google Cloud Spanner, Azure Cosmos DB, or even directly to an analytics datawarehouse such as Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, or Snowflake.

The opportunities to leverage fresh data as it’s created on NonStop from the transactions processed in real time are many. And there are more targets on the way as more businesses turn to Striim for all their data integration needs. “We have enjoyed a long relationship with the NonStop community,” said Striim Cofounder and Executive Vice President, Sami Akbay. “For a number of us this relationship dates back to before we founded Striim. We know NonStop and we know the value of the data created on NonStop and the NonStop customers we have today represent a strong endorsement on the value we provide.”

The value of gold and oil is undeniable. It drives the world’s economies for many centuries. When economies look to be struggling many turn to gold for protection and when Mother Nature delivers a climate event to an unprepared community, oil can provide energy even as other sources struggle to do so. But even with economic and climate changes, data is helping shape the responses of everyone involved. Insight is becoming almost as precise as hindsight and with even more data accessible to business intelligence processes, our business insights one day soon may be every bit as accurate as the hindsight we experience.

As for the value proposition of Striim for NonStop users, Kutay references a current Striim user following an observation everyone in the NonStop community can identify with:

“Our legacy analytics platform used to take an hour per customer data load and weeks for each new deployment. With Striim [Real-Time Data Integration Platform] we are able to transfer operational data to Snowflake [A Cloud Data Platform] in near real-time for all customers,” says Prashant Soral, CTO of Inspyrus.

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

Ferhat Hatay, Ph.D.
Sr. Director of Partnerships and Alliances, Striim, Inc.