Challenge
Companies collect enormous amounts of data over time going from operational data such as stock values, supplier data, orders,.. to financial data such as pricing, payments, bank statements, accounting,.. and even external information such as demographics, benchmarking data, social media,….Only a few legacy software companies supply an all-in-one package. These packages may give you the advantage of integration but are usually not known for their attractive pricing mechanism or usability which makes that companies will mostly own several applications and databases to store this data.
As they say with people, communication is key. The more applications and databases that are present in an organization, the harder it gets to provide business with a logical and structured overview of all relevant functional data. Applications may have the ability to communicate ‘one-on-one’ through APIs and different platforms but to find someone with the skills to access all this data is hard to find.Thorough analytics need solid all-round communication which is only possible through integration of all relevant data sources.
Solution
One of the cornerstones of our reference architecture is the data hub. The data hub enables our customers to connect all their applications and data with each other and centralize all the internal and external data in one single integrated data platform. A data hub is not a technology but a logical architecture and approach to more effectively determine where, when and for whom data needs to be integrated, shared and historicized.
Applications, processes, people, machine learning algorithms, reports, dashboards, … all interact with the Data Hub, potentially in real time, to provide data to or receive data from the Data Hub. A Data Hub enables data sharing by connecting data producers with data consumers to exchange data as fast (near real-time) and standardized as possible.
For one of our customers, we even use that data hub as a migration engine to migrate the data from the legacy applications to the target application.