Julie Fraser and I were introduced to Denodo through a connection made in the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International Smart Manufacturing Community. Denodo is a large, fast-growing data management company with capabilities supporting enterprise data fabric and data integration. We spent some time with the Denodo team, learning about their solution for data virtualization to create “integration without integration.”
Denodo helps companies create a single view of distributed data to drive analytics. As one would expect, the offering provides data integration, management, quality, and governance. But Denodo’s solution does not aggregate and replicate large volumes of data, instead creating a form of data mesh by sourcing and storing metadata while leaving data in place, but accessible. They then use the metadata to create a data catalog that allows self-service data discovery and data preparation on a logical abstraction of a variety of data stores. Although Denodo takes a “logical first” approach, leading with virtualization, they can also support ETL, ESBs, or APIs with over 200 adapters for complete data management and delivery.
Our research shows that manufacturers typically invest significant time and effort in creating and maintaining integrated data to drive decisions and support AI. In particular, they struggle to put IT and OT data in context. Denodo’s abstraction layer and services could play a significant role in simplifying this and deliver significant benefits.
The real value comes by putting the data into action. Denodo provides connectivity to data analysis tools like Tableau or PowerBI to turn that data into actionable insights. In this way, their data virtualization approach can help create intelligence from fragmented and proliferated data in real time without waiting for traditional extract, transformation, and load (ETL) processes.
We’ve seen some case studies and we’re impressed, but we also have more to learn. We believe that Denodo can offer significant value to support manufacturing and supply chain analytics and AI with their data fabric approach. Thank you, Dave Nixon, for making the connection, and Saptarshi Sengupta and Deborah Wiltshire for introducing us to Denodo’s capabilities. We look forward to continuing our learning and watching their progress in manufacturing industries.