Legacy Vendor "Triple Play"

Written by Michael Zuckerman Friday, October 07, 2011 08:25 AM

Instant Video - Excess Expense in Data Integration Projects

I recently listened to a customer story as they shared their view of the benefits of our Advanced Data Virtualization for data integration, business intelligence and data warehouse deployment.

During this conversation I gained an even better sense of how much they are forced to spend with large legacy enterprise vendors. One of the fundamental root causes of the excess expense is clearly caused by the lack of a Unified Platform - every component they have is sold to them separately and by a different division in their vendor's company. The second root cause of excess expense is the perpetual professional services harvest ("every day's a holiday" for these vendors) wrapped around an installed base using a product based upon legacy extract, transform and load (ETL) technology. And the third root cause, if they have the features to play the game, is the scope creep, managed with style and time tested legacy vendor process, around every data integration engagement. The customer called this the "Triple Play" and related the story to us.

Lets look at a typical scenario, as I learned:

Your legacy vendor finds another need for data integration and because of the legacy spiderweb of ETL in your enterprise, is likely the first vendor to the show. You are already spending many thousands of dollars with this vendor annually on both maintenance and professional services. They sit in your meetings, have an office in your facility and you know them by first name. The CIO thinks they are part of your institution. But they don't have one integration platform. Not even two. They have, at my last count, perhaps seven. And all incompatible and different.

The CIO is often misdirected by the relationship and installed base. It is the same way old IBM-MVS(r) systems used to run your business. It is what we know. Data integration and ongoing operations usually fall into the baseline expense portion of your CIO's budget. This part of your CIO's budget, the baseline operating expense, should be constantly pruned and trimmed. The portion of the budget that really counts is how much your CIO has for basic business transformation. This is where potentially great rewards lie - but instead of focusing on ways to achieve this these items get missed again.

So the legacy vendor delivers a professional services proposal, albeit a bit pricey, to get the integration done. Looks like the way to go, doesn't it? We have them in 27 other integrations ... will one more hurt? Meetings (and hourly billing) begin in earnest. The first business flow question of substance arises. How will we relate these business objects? What is the key (or candidate keys) that we will use to take data from several sources and match it together in our new project? It is the same issue in data integration, business intelligence, data warehousing and (virtual) MDM. The same. You need to align these four sources but you need one good key to do it.

Now we need to refer you to our other group and they will give you a 2nd proposal for Data Profiling. They will ascertain the state of your data, your data quality, and determine potential key candidate, and deliver this in a beautiful report, all for yet another $45,000.

Well, now, of course, we have started our Data Integration engagement. We are slowing down, due to no fault of our own, with this particular business unit, because they don't know enough about their data, but even worse, there may be problems with their data. But wait, the results of the Data Profiling engagement are in! Good news! We understand the problems with your data - look at the various data quality issues.

Some can be fixed with tools and will map nicely to a 3rd proposal for a Data Quality engagement. We need a bunch of meetings with various data stewards (again...). This will be another $65,000 we think and this will get the basic Data Integration engagement on the road.

This is a well orchestrated "Triple Play" for the legacy vendor. What could be better - 3 engagements for more than three times than the price of one! The 1st for data integration, the 2nd for data profiling and the 3rd for data quality. They do this, even in knowledgeable accounts, over and over, because this the "accepted approach" for this entrenched legacy vendor. And so ends this typical scenario. The business user pays the bill and the information technology team pays the opportunity cost.

With Advanced Data Virtualization, we have all of the tools in one system, accessible without programming or SQL, to the business user to do everything. So if you want to align and integrate perhaps four sources, which is tremendously hard, time-consuming and difficult using legacy ETL, we provide the tools to immediately ascertain the state of data quality, profile your data, build out candidate keys, implement business rules - and more.

Advanced Data Virtualization may cut your professional services expense by 75% or more. We'll reduce risk, speed deployment and provide an open, auditable platform for your organization. We'll scale better to meet the needs of the largest organization in the world and save you money while you do it. Such is the benefit with new technology - break the bonds of legacy data integration and find out how much benefit you can derive from Advanced Data Virtualization.