The data businesses and applications need are everywhere and access through a multitude of technical interfaces, including APIs, database queries, data layers like ODBC, cloud services and SaaS applications (to name a few).
In this episode of TechStrong TV, Jerod Johnson, technical evangelist at CData, joins Mitch Ashley to discuss the challenges of meeting the data needs applications require to support digital and transformation initiatives.
The video is immediately below, followed by the transcript of the conversation. Enjoy!
Transcript
Mitch Ashley: I’m joined today by Jerod Johnson. Jerrod is technology evangelist with CData. Jerod, good to be talking to you today.
Jerod Johnson: Yeah, no, it’s my pleasure to be here.
Ashley: Well, as an old ex-DBA, data is always kind of a passion of mine, interest of mine, so I’m anxious to hear more about CData. Would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what CData does?
Johnson: Yeah, sure. So, like you introduced me, my name is Jerod Johnson, I’m a Technology Evangelist for CData Software. I’ll start with CData. So, we call ourselves a leading provider of data connectivity solutions. In short, what that means is, we make it easier for every user in an organization to connect to their data, which lets them focus on the job of finding value from that data or building applications on top of that data instead of having to focus on the integration, instead of tasking IT teams to build connectors or pipes or flows, whatever the case is, in order to work with the data that they need to drive business.
Ashley: Mm-hmm. You are number two on my list of what are the reasons people come to IT when they’re building apps.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: And that is, security, data, and other apps.
Johnson: Yeah. [Laughter]
Ashley: So, always need data. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself. I’m curious—how did you become a technology evangelist? How did you—
Johnson: Yeah, so, I actually spent six years teaching before I got into software. So, my education background was in teaching and computer science, and spent six years in a classroom teaching math and computer science, and just decided that we needed a change, for myself and my family.
So, I started at CData, I was actually a member of the support team, which meant I was answering e-mails and helping solve customer problems. And then I moved into engineering, and spent some time there, but it really became obvious that there was a need in the company for somebody with a skill set that I had, being able to speak to people, being able to present information, even write technical documents.
And so, I was pulled into the marketing team, and I’ve been doing that since 2016 for the company. So, writing technical documents, giving talks at trade shows when those used to happen, through webinars.
Ashley: When we were [Cross talk], right? Hopefully soon, hopefully soon.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: Interesting. You’re not the first person I’ve talked to who’s come out of an education background and moved into technology and, in your case, moving into an evangelist role. That whole skill of being able to explain sometimes very complex concepts, sometimes not so complex, but you may not necessarily have the context or the background for a certain thing that you need to learn or understand—
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: Or even explain to non-technical folks, right? So, a great thing to have, especially in the DevRel world that we all live in now of really focusing on how we work with service and kinda think like a developer.
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: Because that’s the people who are using it, whether they’re business developers or people inside IT. Let’s talk about sort of the data challenges, and I’m curious, maybe you’ve seen some things over the last kinda year plus, too, with the acceleration of digital transformation projects.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: It seems that one of the challenges always is data sprawl—it’s everywhere, and every application is creating data, consuming data, sometimes creating data exhaust that’s unused or somebody else might be able to use it. It’s no small feat just to find where it is, more or less find out how you can get to it and use it.
Johnson: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there have been studies done, I think programmable web is probably the best place to look if you’re looking for a list of APIs. And I think that they have 22,000 public APIs listed at this point.
Ashley: Wow.
Johnson: So, I mean, and each of those APIs, you know, there’s data behind it. So, you have that kind of explosion, the API explosion. On top of that, you’ve got private APIs and then databases, data warehouses, these traditional stores. So, data is everywhere.
One of the things that we’ve found is that, as data explodes, as businesses transform digitally, you get the opportunity to pick the best service for your needs. So, you know, you’ve picked your CRM application because it meets your needs the best. You’ve picked your ERP solution because it meets your needs the best.
The consequence of that is that your data is now spread everywhere. So, your CRM data is somewhere, your ERP data is somewhere, your warehousing data is somewhere else. And so, there’s this, as you said, this data sprawl where data is everywhere.
And what we do is, we make it all look the same. So, we like to say that CData lets you see the world as a database. So, we’ve created technologies that allow users to connect to their data, no matter where it is, as if they were connecting to a database. And so, I’ll drop some buzz words, some acronyms here—so, JDBC, ODBC, ADO.NET, these are all database connectivity standards that we’ve produced that now can connect to things that are not databases.
And so, you know, what that does is, it really democratizes data access. Now, anybody can get to data, from any of the tools or applications that they’re using. So, whether you’re looking at an IT team or a DBA or something like a citizen analyst or a data scientist, it doesn’t matter. As soon as your data looks like a database, anybody can work with it.
Ashley: Mm-hmm. That’s interesting you say that citizen data scientist—it’s not just developers. Of course, developers are very familiar with ODBC and other connectivity layers for data access, which are fantastic for developers, but you have to have some pretty specific development skills to be able to [Cross talk] this thing.
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: A lot of this data is sitting on a Dropbox file server in some cloud application, you know, we signed up for a CRM system—well, guess what, I need to connect that with my workflow for when an order comes in. And, you know, as good as Zapier and things like that are for doing kinda nice integrations for automation, that’s not even gonna cut close to solving these kinda problems.
And you mentioned, too, making it look like a database. I’m curious, from my experience, it’s how you get to it and making that understandable.
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: But it’s also understanding the data and what it means and how it’s represented, because a customer is not necessarily defining the attributes similar in a CRM that they might be in an order system, there may be some variations in just the format of how we capture that data.
Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, what we do is, everything that we make sits on top of the API. So, your API is gonna have endpoints, and those endpoints are gonna expose fields for entities.
So, let’s take a customer, for example. When you hit a customer using one of our drivers—hit the customer, well, now, it’s a table, it was an API endpoint. What we’ve done is, we’ve kinda tabularized that data model. So, now, every customer is a row in a database table and then each of the fields for that customer becomes a column.
And then, you know, what we do from there is basically free you to map the data from one system to another as you need, in the tool that you’re using. So, we don’t force a model on you, we’re not trying to create one universal picture of a customer across your organization. We’re gonna let your business specialists do that part. We just make it easier to see, and because it looks like a database, the schema, the metadata, however you define it is really self-describing.
Ashley: Mm-hmm.
Johnson: You know, if you can talk to a database, you can point your tool. So, let’s say you’re looking at something like Tableau. When you point it to a database, it’s gonna show you all of the tables that are available and then all of the columns that are available for each of those tables.
Well, we do the same thing, but for something that isn’t a database. So, it could be a NoSQL store like MongoDB or Couchbase or even Amazon S3. It could be a SaaS application like NetSuite, or even Dynamic CRM. So, whatever it is, you get that full tabular model where you can see exactly what’s there and then you can decide how best to work with that data.
Ashley: I mean, think about the advantage of, if you don’t have, necessarily, all the programming skills you might want, to go get that data, just not having to use an ABI, but use the driver instead.
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: And so, just get that to me in a table form that I can—now, I can compare how one customer is _____ and one, I’m just making that example, to another customer set of attributes and other applications.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: Sometimes it’s hard enough just defining who is—what a customer is. [Laughter]
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: I remember that modeling. But now, you can see what the data is without writing a whole bunch of software and translation and trying APIs and learning specifics about this particular service or this cloud application or whatever it might be.
Johnson: Right. Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of the things that we really offer is, we free you from that integration problem. We free your developers, we free up IT resources. So, APIs are constantly changing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Facebook API, but I think they give a new version, like, every three minutes. I think it’s realistically like every three weeks, but it feels like three minutes when you’re a developer.
Ashley: I try not to be familiar with the Facebook API. [Laughter]
Johnson: Yeah, which—that’s fair. [Laughter] But with our drivers, our engineers are the ones that are keeping up with those changes. So, every quarter, we release a new product, and that includes all of the API changes that have happened on the back end. So, the only thing you have to do is literally install a new driver into your system. There are no changes—no breaking changes to the API, we merge everything as much as we can. And it really, as I said in the beginning, it lets your business experts focus on your business, whatever that is.
Ashley: Mm-hmm. I’m curious, too, is it primarily developers that are using CData and the drivers that you have? How many folks may be from a non-super technical environment, maybe some maybe a little technical skills and might use CData?
Johnson: Yeah, so, that’s a good question. I think it’s a pretty solid blend. So, you know, one customer story might be a mom and pop shop, they wanna be able to look at their QuickBooks data in Excel, they wanna be able to work with it, print it out, edit it, even, and update it that way. They don’t like the QuickBooks UI, they’re familiar with Excel, and so they simply install our Excel add-in, and now they’re connecting directly to QuickBooks from Excel, with full read and write capabilities.
We can get more complicated than that with customer stories. We have one customer who was dealing with that data sprawl, the data silos where their data is everywhere, and they needed a solution that allowed them to replicate all of their data into the data warehouse that they were already using for BI and analytics. And so, we have a tool, CData Sync, that allows them to do that. So, connectivity—solving the connectivity problem and solving the replication problem, so they get automated, incremental replication of all of their business data into one place for BI and analytics.
And then, you know, I touched on this before, but we solved that BI and analytics problem in other ways. So, you know, you have data scientists that are familiar with, that really love their reporting tools, whether that’s Tableau or Power BI or any other tool on the market. They don’t wanna have to change tools just to be able to connect to the data. And with our connectors, that’s exactly what they get to do. They get to stay in the tool that they’re already using.
Ashley: Mm-hmm.
Johnson: But when it comes to developers, this is where we kind of get into our most complex customers. Ultimately, the customer is an organization that’s building a data-centric tool or a platform, and their developers, you know, they’re the ones responsible for maintaining the connections to data from those tools and platforms. So, you know, you’re building the best BI tool on the planet but if it only connects to SQL server, is it really the best? So, we’ve had companies come to us and use our drivers to build products. And what it really frees up there is one-off API integration.
So, if you’re building a tool and you’re connecting directly to the API from your tool, integrating against Salesforce looks one way, integrating against NetSuite looks another way. Integrating against Google BigQuery looks a completely different way. But as soon as you use our drivers, it all looks the same. If you can develop a tool that can talk to a database, you can develop a tool that can talk to anything.
Ashley: And one of the situations I’ve run across several times is through M&A, when you start bringing companies together through acquisitions and of course—
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: – you know, you need information, you need data to operate. I mean, just imagine combining a sales organization across two or multiple companies together and ones in Salesforce and one’s in HubSpot and one’s in homegrown whatever.
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: And, you know, getting that data quickly, you don’t wanna have to go through a whole conversion and, “Okay, now everybody’s in Salesforce” or whatever your tool of choice.
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: Maybe that’s where you go, but you may live six months, two years, where you need data out of multiple systems to see your pipeline, see the sales bundle, see, you know, how we’re closing the deal and what’s the conversion rate and all those kinda things for. And tools like CData are extremely valuable in getting to data very quickly to get value out of that [Cross talk].
Johnson: Right, yeah. I mean, that’s, legitimately, our own personal story. So, when we first started as a business, we had a homegrown CRM, and then we started incorporating HubSpot. And now, you know, as we grow, as we get bigger, those systems don’t work for us anymore, and so now, we’re using Salesforce. And we’re in a place right now where we are concurrently using all three, and actually using our own technology internally to build reports, to do analytics, and then, as part of that process, to migrate data from one system to another—so, moving our data from our internal CRM into HubSpot and then into Salesforce.
So, because the drivers are standard based, because they make things look like a database, it’s incredibly empowering for IT teams and DBAs to work with the data and to either consolidate it or migrate it, or leave it where it is, but build up connections to it in a way that lets the other data experts, the C suite, whoever needs to see the data, see it quickly and easily.
Ashley: That’s a good point. We don’t always wanna take on the work of combining things, migrating things. If you can leave data in place, that makes sense to do.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: Boy, what an asset, because now you can get to it, but—okay, just manage it the way you were. And it’s great that you could relate to that example that I brought up where we didn’t coordinate that, at all.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: I’m curious, how about the security? What comes with data, security is always super important to access control, things like that. Where in the stack does that fall, and how does CData play in those roles?
Johnson: Yeah, so, we will leverage whatever security is available from the API. So, you know, as one example, Salesforce users have different permissions, whether that’s permissions to access different entities, permissions to only read entities, to write entities, whatever the case is.
So, when you connect to Salesforce using any of our connectors, you choose the user that you wanna connect through and then everything that they can do, you can now do through our connector. Anything that they couldn’t do before, you can’t do. And then we support the full gamut of authentication protocols. So, if an API supports OWASP, we’ll support it. If an API supports other authentication schemes, even—so, like, your Microsoft based products, on premise, we do NTLM. If you’re looking at Kerberos authentication, we can manage single sign-on—just whatever is available there, we allow.
And then the protocols that the API uses for security—so, SSL, the encryption, all of that is supported as well, so.
Ashley: I think an advantage you have, since you’re not pulling the data out of those systems and storing it somewhere else, it’s still data that’s living there—
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: – all the security systems, the access controls permissions, policies, et cetera, are still within those applications, however they’re managed, either standalone or collectively across those. So, you’re not having to devise some new data permission scheme from that, right?
Johnson: Right, right.
Ashley: That’s gotta be a huge plus.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: Cool. What do you see as—while we have some time left, here—I’m interested in what you see as sort of emerging applications. You know, we’ve seen a lot of acceleration with digital transformation.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: Digital engagement with customers, automation—there’s many more things happening, and of course, those both need data and create data.
Johnson: Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the things that we’ve seen of late is just this migration to the cloud, where everything is in the cloud, your data’s in the cloud, you’re doing BI in the cloud. So, through products like Tableau Online or the Power BI service, instead of Power BI Desktop, Google Data Studio, AWS QuickSight, whatever the case is, you know, you’re working with data from a cloud platform now instead of something on premise.
So, what we’ve created is, we have a cloud platform that creates a cloud to cloud connection. A lot of the tools that exist today, you know, even if you wanna go from a cloud platform to a cloud data store, you’re still required to put a gateway on premise somewhere. You know, this is the case with a lot of the Power BI connectivity. And, you know, if that doesn’t—why would you go down from the cloud, to on prem, back up to the cloud in order to work with your cloud data? And so, that’s—the CData Connect Cloud Platform is what it’s called, but it allows live, real time cloud to cloud connectivity.
And so, you know, that’s one of the, kinda the emerging trends that we’ve seen is people wanting to just do everything in the cloud. And it makes sense, especially—you know, I think about this past year, right? Everybody’s working remote, you know, you don’t have an on premise server sitting somewhere that can run your platform, you have to move it to the cloud so that everybody that’s working from home can access it, and that’s just one example of this cloud migration that we’ve seen.
Ashley: Nothing like a pandemic—I say that knowing the human tragedy side of it, all due respect, but—
Johnson: Yes.
Ashley: – to really force some very aggressive changes in our business and how we operate and some really interesting things. Is there a particular area of, you mentioned cloud and more usage of cloud services—what’s sort of the next frontier, if you will, that CData is tackling of how to make this data problem easier?
Johnson: Yeah, so, I think—you know, we’re thinking about that cloud integration problem and trying to look for ways to help that. But you know, an area that we’ve started pushing into recently is kinda low code developers. So, I had mentioned you have your IT teams and your full stack developers that are used to working with data, that are used to writing code. But something else that we’ve seen crop up is this low code application development—whether that’s in a cloud platform or an on premise platform. And it’s great. You can build a workflow or an app using a drag and drop menu. These platforms tend to be intuitive. And now, your citizen analysts can build a workflow to combine data to get what they need into their BI tool.
The problem that we’ve seen there is connectivity to data from these platforms, and so, that’s kind of an area that we’ve been pushing in an integration kind of marketing side is reaching out and trying to connect with low code and shoring up our integration with these platforms.
Ashley: Yeah, and by the way, that happens to be an area of research that we’re working on with CData, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that here coming up in a few weeks—some really good, interesting findings from that research.
And that was really interesting to Accelerated Strategies, the analyst firm that I run, because there is so much interesting in low code/no code right now.
Johnson: Yeah.
Ashley: And of course, it’s so broad of what that means. It could mean a spreadsheet to somebody, you know, as well as low code or platform, you know, there’s a number of platforms for creating applications and accessing data through a CData kinda combined platform. So, it’s really interesting, to me, of kinda who is using low code technologies to create applications.
And I think the world used to view it, or maybe currently views it as, those are the business users, non-technical. That’s certainly a population, but it’s more and more coming into IT is what I’m seeing.
Johnson: Yeah, that’s cool. I mean, as somebody who was a developer, was a support engineer, it’s fascinating for me to get my hands on a low code platform and figure out, you know—well, what exactly can I do with this?
Ashley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s interesting technology. Another way to solve problems, another technology, right, to build the applications.
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: How about the mobile side of this? With so many more mobile apps, we’re almost in an era, maybe we’re in the era of, “I’d like fries with that, I’d like a mobile app with that.”
Johnson: Sure.
Ashley: Or maybe it is mobile first. Does that change the dynamics of some of the data needs or challenges?
Johnson: So, I think once you start looking at mobile applications, you’re looking for lightweight applications, right? You can’t—I mean, phones are impressive now, right? Like, I think about the amount of data that I can store on my phone versus the first smartphone that I got, you know, the amount of space that I have for apps. But at the same time, you know, embedding a software library or a driver or whatever the case is into your app, it doesn’t always make sense. Especially if you’re building an app that supposed to be able to connect to hundreds of different data sources.
Ashley: Mm-hmm.
Johnson: You know, are you gonna install 100 different 7 megabyte drivers with your app? Like, is that really the best way to go? And that’s another place where our cloud platform makes sense. So, you can be on your mobile app, you can connect—you can build an application that connects to a cloud platform that then allows users to connect to data from anywhere.
Ashley: Mm-hmm.
Johnson: So, you know, using the same technology that we have, it’s just consolidated into one single platform. So, you hit that platform and now, you know, you can pull in Salesforce data, you can write back to HubSpot, you can dump a report as CSV into AWS S3, all through one platform.
Ashley: And you know, so many of those apps aren’t necessarily greenfield apps, right? All that data, maybe even the transactions processing, much of it is happening in other apps, other cloud locations.
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: So, when you’re building a mobile app, you know, you’re not inventing everything from the bottom up, right?
Johnson: Right.
Ashley: You’re merging a lot of existing resources—functionality as well as data. So, it seems like no better—what better of a kind of application where making it easier to get the data? Because, you know, mobile developers don’t like writing database access code, right? They like building interfaces and doing cool interactions and useful interactions with customers.
Johnson: Right, right.
Ashley: So, when you can let them focus on that and really create great experiences with that data, that’s a win/win for everybody, it seems like.
Johnson: Yeah, no, I agree.
Ashley: Well, cool. I really enjoyed talking with you, and where can folks find out about CData? What kinds of abilities do they have to check you out, from free accounts or sandboxing or things like that?
Johnson: Yeah. So, CData.com is our website, and you’ll find all the information that you need there. For any of our installable products, we offer 30-day free trials, and they’re fully functional trials. You know, we’re not rate limiting, we’re not doing anything like that. And then with our trials, you get access to our support team, which we’ve been called world class, we have testimonials on our website if you really wanna dig into those.
Ashley: Comes from a man who was on the support team, so.
Johnson: That’s right. [Laughter]
Ashley:[Laughter] No, I’m sure it’s really great.
Johnson: And then, you know, for the Cloud Platform, I think we offer a two-week trial, and so, you can kinda kick the tires on that as well. So, CData.com/drivers is where you wanna go if you’re interested in an installable driver. CData.com/connect is where you can go if you’re interested in that Connect platform, that Cloud Platform for connectivity. And then, you know, you can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us on Twitter, we’re @CDataSoftware. You can find us on Facebook. A lot of our posting there is upcoming events or recent articles or other news announcements, so.
Ashley: Yeah, and I have checked out your drivers, and you know, an analogy like a Swiss Army knife falls apart very quickly, because you have so many technologies, so many platforms that you interface with—it’s about 50 Swiss Army knives. [Laughter]
Johnson: Yeah. So, I’m just gonna plug this—so, I think we’re 250 plus different data sources across 11 technologies. So, somebody out there is doing the math right now in their head to figure out how many SKUs we’re sitting on right now.
Ashley: The number of permutations—well, good. It’s really been good talking with you, and I look forward to having you all on again and talking some more, I think, about the low code/no code space and some things that are happening there, so we’ll look forward to that.
Johnson: Yeah. Alright, yeah. Thanks, Mitch, it’s been my pleasure.
Ashley: Great. Jerod Johnson, who’s Technology Evangelist with CData.
