Denodo Helps Co.s Reduce Data Preparation Efforts by 67%” Says Angel Vina

Denodo is a leader in data management. The award-winning Denodo Platform is the leading data integration, management, and delivery platform that uses a logical approach to enable self-service BI, data science, hybrid/multi-cloud data integration, and enterprise data services. Realizing more than 400% ROI and millions of dollars in benefits, Denodo's customers across large enterprises and mid-market companies in 30+ industries have received payback in less than 6 months. Analytics Insights has engaged in an exclusive interview with Angel Vina, Founder & CEO, of Denodo

1.Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Denodo is a leader in data management. We have developed the Denodo Platform for data integration and management to enable organizations to connect to all of their data in real-time. Denodo has a worldwide footprint spanning 25 offices across 20 countries, including new offices in South Korea, Sweden, and Thailand.

Denodo's modern data management platform designed to integrate, manage, and deliver data in complex, hybrid, multi-cloud environments with high performance, is powered by data virtualization technology that Denodo has pioneered for more than two decades.

The Denodo Platform accelerates data provisioning through reduced data replication, enables consistent security and governance across multiple systems, and it promotes seamless data discovery and self-service data access for business users, giving them the flexibility to use their preferred applications.

2.What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Every company rooted in making data-driven business decisions is realizing that it is impractical to move all of its data into a single repository such as a cloud data lake or cloud data warehouse. Companies are primarily selecting the Denodo Platform to build their logical data fabric to integrate and manage their enterprise data and deliver it to business stakeholders.

The Denodo Platform is powered by data virtualization technology, which is a logical data layer that integrates all enterprise data siloed across disparate systems and manages the unified data with centralized security and governance, giving real-time access to all data stakeholders. While Denodo's logical data integration and management capabilities are key differentiators against traditional data integration and management vendors that offer physical data consolidation, Denodo is further differentiated by offering the broadest range of performance acceleration and metadata management capabilities.

3.How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian market, and what are your plans to tap into this market?

We see a huge potential in the Indian market, particularly in the area of financial services. With the recent surge in cybercrime, coupled with the introduction of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there has been a significant shift in the region's focus on data protection.

Denodo offers a best-of-breed enterprise data management and integration platform to help deliver actionable insights to the business, with minimal effort but with robust end-to-end security. Denodo has already been successful with the largest Indian organizations, such as private Banks in India.

We have one of the largest corporate campuses in Chennai India, serving the APAC market, and we have also invested heavily in building systems integration partnerships with many well-known Indian brands such as Cognizant and HCL. We recently recruited a regional vice president who will oversee our growth in India, and I am very excited about our prospects for India in the coming years

4.What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We have been growing at more than 50% CAGR for many years in terms of revenue. I personally feel that the growth trajectory will remain stable for the foreseeable future, given the market demand. We are building very strong technology and systems integration partnerships around the world, especially in the APAC region, to not only sustain but propel our growth. We are heavily investing in R&D to continuously meet our customer's needs and demands, and at the same time, we are heavily investing in our support and services offerings, which have a strong presence in India. As mentioned earlier, we are currently operating in 25 offices across 20 countries, and for the past 3-4 years we have been increasing our presence in 2-3 new countries every year, to better serve local market needs

5.How is your company helping customers to deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of your company's technology innovations?

Denodo's customers have said that they gain significant benefits and ROI when leveraging a logical approach to data management and integration. This is due to the key technology component being data virtualization.

Denodo recently commissioned a report with Forrester, a leading global market research company, on the total economic impact of using data virtualization. According to Forrester, data virtualization improves access to data across disparate sources and delivers a unified view of the data faster, cheaper, and uses fewer resources than traditional data integration approaches. Over a three-year period, customers accrued benefits such as $1.7M in savings over-extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, $1.7M with improved operational efficiency, $1.5M from legacy integration costs, $1.2M through improved profits, and $700K from efficiency gain by data scientists. The overall composite cost to the same organizations was $1.4M in net present value. That boils down to a 400% ROI over a three-year period. Listening to the requirements of our customers is key. Approximately 50% of our product roadmap comes directly from customer feedback through product advisory councils and forums.

6.Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and client feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Denodo customers' positive sentiments about our product, services, and support have been captured as part of the Gartner Peer Insights reviews for the past 2-3 years and, as a result, Denodo has again been recognized as a Customer's Choice in the Gartner Peer Insights "Voice of the Customer: Data Integration Tools", 28 January 2022 edition. With an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5, Denodo is one of the only three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools Leaders to receive Customers' Choice for 2022 and is the third highest-rated data integration vendor in the report. Denodo was also positioned as a Leader for the Third Consecutive Year in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools. Denodo is also a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q2 2022, and The Forrester Wave™: Data Virtualization.

During 2022, Denodo customers and the Denodo Platform were honored with numerous awards and recognitions, such as TDWI Best Practices Award, Ventana Research Digital Leadership Award, and DBTA Readers' Choice Awards

7.Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

Denodo has seen significant revenue growth and momentum in new customer acquisitions and cloud marketplace offerings. Denodos' cloud marketplace presence encountered the fastest growth with more than 300 transactions in 2021. Denodo is close to becoming a 100 percent subscription-based business, with subscription license revenue growing by more than 50 percent year-over-year.

We have also recently announced two new subscriptions that are designed to help medium-sized businesses to start with a small departmental use case and then expand to multiple use cases within the company. This offering enables these types of companies to leverage the technology within a limited budget before growing their deployments and use cases as they deliver more value and gain efficiencies.

8.How has the adoption of data virtualization in India evolved over the last few years?

India is a fast-growing market for Denodo, with many of our global customers having local data projects in India. We now see more and more use cases of the Denodo Platform being deployed within the region, as many of their technologists are based there.

India offers an immense pool of highly skilled technologists. Many global companies see this as an opportunity and are leveraging these skills as they face skill shortages in many parts of the world. 

Thus, while we have very few customers headquartered in India, many of our international customers present in India are helping in the accelerated adoption of data virtualization technology among Indian organizations.

9.Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/analytics space?

Our customers are constantly looking into newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to simplify and strengthen their data and analytics initiatives, and automate as much of their data integration and management processes as possible.

With the Denodo Platform, security protocols can be administered across disparate sources from a single point of control. This means that all data access and usage can be monitored and logged. These data usage statistics, or active metadata, can also be analyzed to better service data consumers, whether that be through data recommendations or to improve the performance of data delivery.

Denodo has introduced advanced semantics and embedded AI/ML techniques to help enterprise data and analytics teams to automate frequently used data management functions, improve collaboration between data stewards and business users, and secure data access.

10.How can businesses efficiently extract the value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

The Denodo Platform provides a well-controlled logical data management framework that can be used to effectively manage a highly distributed and complex data ecosystem. Companies can leverage their existing technology investments, for added simplicity. Using a logical approach means leaving the data at the source, reducing the amount of data replication, and supporting data pipelines that are expensive to build and maintain.

Our customers are able to streamline their data processing and reduce ETL and data preparation efforts by as much as 67%. This can translate into significant cost savings.

11.What are the skill sets that you specifically look for when hiring for the Denodo Platform?

Denodo technology leverages similar skills that organizations have already invested in. These are primarily database management and data engineering skills. The platform UI is easy to learn and our customers are able to leverage the benefits very quickly through logical modeling and a flexible, low code/no code development environment.

Denodo is also committed to helping our customers succeed with the Denodo Platform; so, we offer a very comprehensive network of technical support and services.

12.Would you also like to give some more details about how big data analytics/ML/AI/IoT is being used at Denodo? How has it been progressing?

Denodo has added some major capabilities including Advanced Semantics and AI Recommendations. The logical data management architecture allows for the gathering of key information about data access and delivery. The platform can track who accesses what data, when, and how.

Our latest release of the Denodo Platform uses AI to automatically recommend data sets to data consumers and recommend the best summaries to increase query performance. We leverage a complex algorithm that combines data usage history and impact simulations to generate these recommendations.