Modern organizations are faced with a fundamental challenge in their quest to maximize their competitive advantage: designing and implementing coherent and scalable processes for the classification, consolidation and distribution of data generated from their day-to-day activity. Usually, this is left to CTOs or similar roles, which are held responsible for the rational use of resources and effort in the pursuit of insights and analysis that deliver real business value to their organizations, granting them the ability to see what others cannot. It is that foresight which provides the real competitive advantage.
There are some who prefer to build an ecosystem of COTS or in-house solutions for each individual process, granting them what seems like more "independence" and "control" over the entire data lifecycle. However, it soon becomes evident that these are apparent goods: as the needs of the organization grow so does the complexity of instantiating and integrating these individual solutions, leading to increasingly opaque approximations where there is no unifying thread that allows to have a concise knowledge of where data is, how is it being processed and what is the true state (or consistency) of the end products being delivered to end users.
We know this reality because we have seen it in multiple customers and partners, who have come to us with a simple question: how can we address our data-related needs within a manageable approach that provides coherence without renouncing to the flexibility our organization needs?
It is against this backdrop that we have designed Sidra's architecture with one goal in mind: enabling data teams to design, implement, and validate data products that deliver tangible value to business personas within an integrated, coherent, yet flexible data platform. In this objective we are not alone: other platform/framework similar to Sidra offer a similar -if not identical- promise.
Sidra's key advantage over its competition emanates from its holistic approach to the data lifecycle. Given the functional and non-functional coverage of our platform, we offer a level of coherence and vertical integration that no other solution can match, which manifests not only in reduced costs and increased reliability and resilience for our customer base, but on an unmatched level of convenience for the teams working on the platform. In layman terms, while our competition focuses on specific processes and/or features, our focal point is on a cohesive end-to-end solution where each element is not an end in itself, but part of carefully orchestrated processes designed to deliver the best overall performance, efficiency and ease of use.
A clear example of this philosophy is our metadata engine, which not only delivers tremendous value through its advanced inference and update capabilities, but also acts as a unifying force throughout the entire data lifecycle within Sidra. The moment a dataset is ingested into Sidra, the system will use its metadata to track any schema changes, enabling their automatic propagation through the synchronization process to any consumer data products, which provides an unparallel flexibility for developers and data scientists working on those.
Data Quality is another showcase of the same vertical integration benefits, since this service not only allows Sidra Operators to detect datasets or records that may be in violation of expected morphological expectations, but will also share with each domain that uses those entities the fact that such a violation has occurred, enabling developers to adjust their transformations to benefit from that foresight provided by the platform. Again, an individual service acts as a unifying force within the entire ecosystem of the platform, bringing to life the maxim that the whole is better than the sum of the parts.
But there is another dimension to vertical integration that goes beyond data processes themselves and enhances Sidra as a platform in itself: the centralized management of all the services of the platform from a single interface called Supervisor. This means that customers and partners are not only provided with unrivalled transparency for what they are doing within the platform, but also for each of the individual services that, together, constitute the platform as an integrated solution. This enables the activation and installation of services as needed, coupled with a local control of the update cycle of each one of them without the need for any intervention from us as product providers.
With Sidra, customers and partners can be confident that each individual activity is carefully orchestrated within an organic process, which delivers key both functional and non-functional advantages that translate in real-life gains for both organizations and particular data projects alike.
If you are convinced that a vertically-integrated approach is key for value delivery, contact us at info@sidra.dev and schedule a demo of the most comprehensive data platform in the market.