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Data-as-a-service platform connects to nearly any data source, exposing it in near real time
Ovum TNT Intelligence | Informa – August 14, 2018
Summary
Catalyst
In the self-service and 360-degree digital era, fluid data access and aggregation from multiple sources is a prerequisite for successful business initiatives. Historically, however, data has been contained within silos – different databases, applications, and repositories – that all have different policies, security, and permissions. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, which were highly technical, manual, and time-consuming in nature, were the de facto method for joining data from various sources: with the end goal typically being to place aggregated data in a centralized data warehouse. Today, the problem is more complicated. Data needs to be accessed, combined, and analyzed in near real time, yet data silos have proliferated across the cloud and on-premises.
K2View's Data Fabric platform was designed to address this challenge. Originally built as a faster and more efficient way to conduct ETL, the platform today offers data-as-a-service (DaaS) – connecting to virtually any data source, organizing it around logical business entities, and exposing it in real time to devices, applications, and services. Governance and security are also addressed, aligning the platform with existing information management frameworks.
Key messages
- Near real-time data access and aggregation is enabled by K2View Data Fabric, delivering data to empower operations and eliminating the need for legacy ETL processes.
- Data Fabric organizes data around single logical business entities, such as a customer, and stores data for each entity in a secure micro-database.
- K2View Data Fabric is an enabler of 360-degree initiatives with its ability to quickly expose and join data from legacy, digital, and cloud repositories and systems.
- Security and governance capabilities are built into K2View Data Fabric, offering patent-pending encryption at the business entity level and embedded data access controls with masking capabilities based on uses and roles.
- K2View Data Fabric provides extensive libraries for data management that support real time, cleansing, transformation, enrichment, and data generation.
Overview
The problem of data silos has not subsided with the enterprise migration to the cloud; today, there are more diverse data repositories and applications than ever before. K2View has set out to solve the very real (and painful) business problem of joining, organizing, and exposing data from these various sources – doing so in a near real-time fashion that facilitates digital transformation efforts.
Avoiding the legacy pitfalls of the past, K2View Data Fabric uses commodity hardware and has lightweight architecture. As a DaaS platform, it aims to facilitate the leverage of data in modern use cases while having as little administrative overhead itself as possible.
Recommendations for enterprises
Why put K2View Data Fabric on your radar?
Enterprise-scale organizations with highly diverse and distributed IT ecosystems spread across the cloud and on-premises will stand to benefit the most from K2View's offering. Real-time capabilities will appeal to any business striving for digital transformation.
K2View Data Fabric will also be of special interest to any organization that is attempting to conduct a 360-degree initiative due to the platform's ability to expose and aggregate data around logical business entities.
Highlights
Background
K2View was founded in Israel in 2009 by CTO Achi Rotem and COO Rafi Cohen, and the product was originally focused on creating a faster, more reliable, and low-risk way to conduct ETL processes that have traditionally been the primary means of aggregating data from disparate sources. The primary problem it addressed was the forced business downtime required to move data from existing systems to new technologies. Instead of moving data the way ETL does, one table at a time, K2View created a solution that moved data by business entity (e.g. all the data related to a single customer across tables). This eliminated the need for system downtime, and enabled the business to start using the new technologies much faster with lower risk.
Current position
The company and product are currently well rooted in the telco space; however, the customer base has expanded to include firms in the financial, healthcare, and life science verticals. The product itself is horizontal in nature, serving the needs of any large enterprise environment, but it performs especially well in regulated industries where there is additional emphasis on security and governance. By enabling security and permission settings, the K2View Data Fabric platform helps homogenize the governance process by providing an abstracted layer of control to create unified policies for data that natively sit in disparate repositories.
Architecturally, K2View Data Fabric is fairly unique. It sits as a layer between the sources of data (databases, repositories, files, APIs, etc.) and the destinations for data (user applications). However, the true "secret sauce" of K2View Data Fabric's architecture is the organization of data around logical business entities, with the data for each unique entity stored in its own secure micro-database. This capability is patent-pending. When the enterprise can aggregate and store all data on a given customer, product, supplier, or any other entity in its own micro-database, it provides a single view of that particular thing, offering immense insight from data that was formerly scattered across silos. This way of organizing and storing data enables data to be updated and generated in real time for interactions that require the most "up to the minute" information. Micro-databases, too, are at the foundation of K2View's security capabilities; with each logical unit's micro-database encrypted separately with its own encryption keys (leveraging a proprietary encryption key schema algorithm), the risk of a mass data breach involving multiple entities is essentially eliminated.
The most common use case for the K2View Data Fabric platform is customer 360-degree initiatives, owing to its unique business entity-centric organization of data and micro-database architecture. Data can be organized around a single customer, with all relevant data (from various source repositories) about that customer stored in its own encrypted, secure micro-database. However, this capability is by no means limited to customers. Any time a single view of an entity, such as a product or network, is desired, the same capabilities are leveraged.
Currently, there are few direct competitors to K2View in the market; most competition in the sales cycle comes from large, established vendors that have traditionally offered ETL capabilities, or from newer vendors that offer modernized data integration capabilities. K2View sees its platform as being broader than these offerings, offering end-to-end data access, organization, and exposure of data in near real time to any device, application, or service – all while keeping data continually synched and refreshed.
Data sheet
Key facts
| Table 1: Data sheet: K2View | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product name | K2View Fabric | Product classification | Data integration | |||
| Version number | 4.0 | Release date | June 2018 | |||
| Industries covered | Telco, financial, retail, healthcare, life sciences | Geographies covered | North America, EMEA, Latin America | |||
| Relevant company sizes |
Enterprise | Licensing options | Subscription, perpetual license | |||
| URL | www.k2view.com | Routes to market | Direct, channel | |||
| Company headquarters | Dallas, Texas, US | Number of employees | 100 | |||
Source: Ovum
Appendix
On the Radar
On the Radar is a series of research notes about vendors bringing innovative ideas, products, or business models to their markets. Although On the Radar vendors may not be ready for prime time, they bear watching for their potential impact on markets and could be suitable for certain enterprise and public sector IT organizations.
Author
Paige Bartley, Senior Analyst, Data and Enterprise Intelligence
paige.bartley@ovum.com
Ovum Consulting
We hope that this analysis will help you make informed and imaginative business decisions. If you have further requirements, Ovum’s consulting team may be able to help you. For more information about Ovum’s consulting capabilities, please contact us directly at consulting@ovum.com.
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