For channel partners, Attunity’s new level of automation of the data pipeline to the Azure cloud frees them from migration processes that took months, and lets them provide more strategic services to customers.
Attunity pipeline in Azure
Attunity, which makes data integration and big data management software solutions, has announced two new solutions for the Microsoft Azure cloud. Attunity for Data Lakes on Microsoft Azure is designed to automate streaming data pipelines. Attunity Compose for Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse enables data warehouse automation for Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
“We have a very long-standing relationship with Microsoft,” said Dan Potter, VP of Product Marketing at Attunity. “It goes back to the SQL Server days, when we were the only third party technology that shipped with SQL Server, and now with the move to Azure, we have expanded that relationship in the cloud. We are excited about the Azure platform because it has been a big source of growth for us.
The Attunity solutions build on their core skillset of creating analytics-ready data sets from heterogeneous data sources, and moving them in an efficient data pipeline to the cloud
“We are in the integration space, and do some very unique things in helping an organization move to the cloud, such as moving data in real time without it impacting core transaction readiness,” Potter said. “We also structure the data and make it analytics ready. If you are using a data lake, storing in native object store, we can structure it so it doesn’t become a data swamp. We already support at least ten different technologies on Azure. However, with these new solutions, we are bringing full end-to-end automation to completely automate the creation of analytics-ready structures. It’s an end-to-end data pipeline point from the end data to where it is analyzed. Attunity automates it. Everything is pushed into real time and updated in Azure so the data scientists always analyze fresh data.”
Attunity for Azure Data Lakes uses Apache Spark as a high-performance engine to automate the generation of transformations and analytics-ready data sets in data lakes running on Azure. That allows Attunity’s target market – the data engineers who build the pipelines for data users – to quickly create reusable, automated data pipelines that streamline the delivery of analytics-ready data sets to end users.
Dan Potter, VP of Product Marketing at Attunity
“It replaces a lot of hand coding, such as people writing out scripts or using manually intensive tools like Hadoop Pig or traditional ETL tools to stitch it all together,” Potter said. “We want to automate the data pipeline, so the customer just has to point to the source of data they want in the cloud, point to where they want it in the cloud, and identify what they want done with the analytics.”
Potter said that there is strong demand for their Azure SQL Date Warehouse offering.
“There has been a resurgence in cloud data warehousing,” he stated. “Snowflake, one of the big unicorns last year, is a proof point. Data warehousing is not dead but it has changed drastically from the monolithic on-prem days. The cloud warehouses arrived because people need to have analytics-ready data to use the data. With Hadoop, you could throw data in, but it was hard to make it ready for analytics, which was Hadoop’s weak point. The cloud data warehouses do that, and they decouple storage from processing, so are a nice fit for us architecturally.”
Attunity Compose for Data Warehouses lets users automate the data warehouse design, data loading, transformation, and updates for Azure SQL Data Warehouses, dynamically adjusting data sources and models to accommodate changing business requirements.
Both solutions provide transactional data for cloud analytics efficiently and in near real-time, with continuously streaming data and metadata updates.
While most of Attunity’s business is direct, a higher proportion of the business for these solutions is likely to go through partners because of the nature of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
“Our own business is largely direct, although we do have reseller relationships with integrators like Accenture and Cognizant,” Potter said. “However, the Microsoft ecosystem is an interesting one. Microsoft has been successful in the cloud in the enterprise, because they have both direct sellers and a strong partner ecosystem there. Amazon and Google don’t have the same traditional enterprise presence and are building that up.”
For a channel partner, the real value of these kinds of solutions from Attunity is to free the partner from doing a lot of grunt work, and be able to focus on services with more strategic value to the customers.
“Our integrator partners like us, because to get the real value of a platform, you need to get the data there, and have it continually refreshed,” Potter said. “That’s what we do. As a result, the partner doesn’t have to focus on the plumbing. They can focus on strategic value – not on moving data to a cloud data lake over six to nine months. We empower SI partners to rapidly deliver results. Our ability to automate that process takes care of the table stakes, so they can do the more exciting stuff.”
