Services > Architect > Data Virtualization

The silos. The spreadmarts. If you can't beat them, you could, in fact, join them.

With Clarity's data virtualization services, you can build a bridge to your islands of information, and make your users feel as though they never left home.

In the factory that is your BI environment, data integration puts in the most overtime and gets the least ahead. We know what it's like in the trenches:

• Your business users regularly need new applications or enhancements that must source data from new or different systems.
• Your analysts create sandboxes where they experiment with data to generate information.
• Your business units resist embracing a centralized data warehouse, preferring their data marts instead.
• Your IT group often needs to upgrade or migrate a database, and keep two versions running for a period of time.

These things stress your data integration processes, which can require long development cycles to correct. All the while, critical business information is delayed in reaching decision makers, and competitive agility is lost.

There's a way to lighten the load on this straining conveyor belt: data virtualization.

Data virtualization's ability to integrate data from multiple, heterogenous sources; apply the right transformations; build a unified view; and deliver it to you, all on the fly, makes it the workhorse that ETL is--except with wings.

Not only can data virtualization save you time, cost, and processing power--all salves directly applicable to your bottom line--but it can also provide other returns, like more complete customer insight (because your queries aren't limited to only certain data types or structures), and more consistent data (because your BI applications can get the truth from one middleware layer, rather than from several operational and database systems).

Clarity maintains a data virtualization practice to help clients plan and implement data virtualization. We'll evaluate your current environment and needs to determine if virtualization is right for you, and to identify any gaps that you might have to fill first. We'll also architect and build your data virtualization environment as part of your overall solution blueprint, addressing all of the following:

• Your data quality - your source systems need this for data virtualization, which performs mostly basic quality checks in the semantic layer.
• Your data sets - millions upon millions of rows of data may mean you need to take scalability measures first.
• Your systems and networks - they need to be high performing and available for data virtualization.
• Your software vendors - some have conditions for supporting their applications in a virtualized environment.

Data virtualization is a technology that proves the future is really here, but it's not for everybody. To learn how or if data virtualization can benefit your organization, contact us today.