Taming data growth, readying it for access

Data is the new battleground, and many current industry disruptors are significant testament to how more agile management of data is giving them the edge over more established businesses.

Case in point is hospitality disruptor, Airbnb, which has a valuation higher than most hotel chains like Marriot and Sheraton. Observers may also note that Airbnb is actually in the platform business.

They are able to scale very quickly; 170 countries in five years; and they do not need to own any assets because their platform would match asset owners with consumers who want to use these assets.

What Airbnb does own however, is data.

The unique differentiation though, is that this company and many others like it use technologies such as data virtualisation to tame rapid data growth in their respective companies, and ready it for access and use for other solutions like analytics.

TIBCO Software, a global integration and analytics solutions provider is in a unique position to offer these data virtualisation solutions to companies which seek to rein in their data growth and harness it to create new business models and realise business objectives.

Disruption from within 

The thing to note is, disruption can come from within established organisations themselves.

The many years of being in business, may see their data assets scattered across various environments, residing in different departments, different traditional databases, and in different database formats and/or different cloud locations.

Due to data virtualisation, access to an organisation’s big data store, traditional databases, packaged applications, cloud sources and more – in a single view – is enabled.

More specifically, TIBCO’s data virtualisation solution, proposes to orchestrate access to these multiple and varied data sources, while also delivering data sets and IT-curated data services.

Faster analytics now

TIBCO Data Virtualization is a vendor-agnostic solution that can model and transform analytics data sets quickly. Via industry-standard APIs like ODBC, REST, SOAP and more, analytics data can be delivered to a wide range of analytics vendor tools to enable capabilities like reporting, visualisation, business intelligence, and more such functions

Notably because of this, it can potentially optimise analytics queries to deliver up-to-the-minute information.

In other words, it simplifies management and access to data, so that an organisation can successfully use all of the data that it has.

KBTG, a fintech subsidiary of Thailand’s K Bank, is one example of this.

Having recognised that a digital bank is the way forward, it sought to re-invent how they use their customers’ data, so they would be able to serve 16 million retail banking customers in a flexible and agile way.

From early on, it also set the goal for itself to be able to compete with non-banking companies that addressed different customer lifestyles needs, especially mobile app usage.

In order to achieve this, KBTG turned to TIBCO’s Data Virtualization software to improve its data delivery.

Now, it is able to handle up to 10 million transactions daily, thanks to the data virtualisation layer which pulls data from up to 30 downstream systems and up to 15 data sources.

Think of this abstraction layer as having unified disparate data without creating copies or siloes.This is significant for KBTG to be able to do more with its data and extract further value from it.

Stability and higher performance

Fred Roteseree, KBTG’s Deputy Managing Director had shared, “A stable platform is key to everything. If the platform is unstable, the customer is not going to use your product because they don’t like the experience.”

For example, a mobile app may claim to be able to deliver services like banking transactions while on-the-move. But if the user experience is less than flawless, there is real risk of losing customers, instead.

Fred admitted that KBTG competes against non-banks like 7-Eleven and e-wallets. In light of this, it needs to be able to handle a lot more transactions than its more traditional parent company, and downtime is not an option.

Time-saving, faster go-to-market

TIBCO’s data virtualisation system has unique ability to turn large volumes of data into a report. These large volumes of data could be from over 4000 tables, or from a complex data warehouse with up to 40 data marts.

With report generation taken care of, as well as time and effort saved from having to physically move data into a single source, KBTG’s team has the freedom to finetune their manipulation of the data, to achieve desired outcomes.

Fred said, “We can create a sandbox environment, add another source of data into the report within days as opposed to six months. We can publish data services in a variety of formats within weeks as opposed to months and deliver them in a standardised format within a single layer. Web services can be built in a few hours now.”

To a KBTG customer, an example of what this looks like is the “My Portfolio” screen, which shows them every banking product and account that they have.

Instead of being stored in multiple systems according to different products and accounts, KBTG can quickly combine it all, for easy-to-understand display to its customers.