CloverDX Blog on Data Integration

Data Integration, Automation, and How to Overcome Your Biggest Data Challenges (Interviews With the Experts)

Written by CloverDX | March 10, 2020

At CloverDX, we’re eager to share the insights we’ve gained through our work helping companies with their data needs.

We enjoy moving the conversation forward because we believe in the importance of empowering businesses to dominate their data so they can unlock its true value.

With this in mind, we recently asked CloverDX experts to share their opinions on some of the biggest topics and questions when it comes to data integration.

The three topics we covered were:

  1. The power of automated data integration
  2. Why is data integration so important?
  3. Overcoming your biggest data challenges

For each topic, we talked with two to three members of the CloverDX team.

Here’s what they had to say.

(Minor edits have been made to the transcripts for readability).

1. The power of automated data integration

Jiri Vojtek, Chief Operating Officer, CloverDX: ‘So, everything has to be automated. That’s why automation is built into the core of our product. After the first phases when you are developing things, joining things up, setting up the mappings, and many other technical things.

But then one day, you would like to push the button and it will run. And, maybe, it'll fail occasionally, but the next time when you are doing it (because you fixed other things), you will again click the button and it will work time and again.

So, when we develop something, we are always thinking about automation and the technical side. It will be an iterative process. And you don't want to have any manual work in that process, because it brings errors, it's time-consuming and people don't like it.’

David Pavlis, Chief Executive Officer, CloverDX: With CloverDX, we are trying to implement something which will release people from mundane tasks so they can focus on some more creative work, and automation is the way to do it.

If we leave the customer with something which needs manual interaction or some manual attention, then we failed on delivering on the promise, which is to automate the mundane and leave people to focus on solving some problems and issues in a creative way.’

2. Why is data integration so important?

Pavel Najvar, Marketing Director, CloverDX: When you do data integration right, you enable more people in your organisation to use data both to the advantage of the customer and also to the advantage of the company.

If you don't do data integration right, you end up with data sets that are isolated. You don't lose the data – you just don't have the ability to give access to it to more people.’

Michal Tomcanyi, Chief Technical Officer, CloverDX: ‘Data integration helps you to either access data, or to ship the data to where it's needed, in the format and the time that it's needed, plus it enables the least transformation.

All that together, either accelerates the work that people are doing because it eliminates the manual tasks or it saves costs because the work is getting done faster.’

David Pavlis, Chief Executive Officer, CloverDX: ‘The data integration basically means that you can reach to data and bring the data to where there can be some value extracted.

So, in the sense, I believe the future is in wider integration of data.’

3. Overcoming your biggest data challenges

Alex Donnelly, VP Sales, CloverDX: ‘When you're swimming in a sea of data and looking at the literally hundreds of different failed data warehousing and big data projects that we've worked on, I think choice of data and proliferation of data can be quite dangerous.

At the same time, if intelligently done and designed from the beginning to enable people to have access in a controlled manner, it certainly offers a lot of options that maybe in the last 10 or 15 years weren't available.’

David Pavlis, Chief Executive Officer, CloverDX: ‘The complexity is growing because we are trying to tackle larger data challenges. I believe it's very similar to when you are building a house. If you're building a higher house, the complexity doesn't grow linearly, it grows exponentially.

As we are progressing in a quest to digitalize and automate, the new challenges are way more complex.’

Pavel Najvar, Marketing Director, CloverDX: 'The data integration challenge is: ‘‘how do I get from too much data to useful data?’’

So the data integration challenges is actually how do I reduce the amount of data I have to something that's useful.

Oftentimes, you get people too enthusiastic about data. They try to get as much as they can, which is much easier than getting the actual value from the data. That's where you have to be clever.’

Data integration for the modern business

When it comes to data, automation and data integration, we’re committed to moving the conversation forward.

After all, it’s clear that organizations struggle to manage the vast amounts of data they handle every day, let alone to get the value they need from it.

For further insights on data integration, automation, and more, explore our resources, or talk with one of the CloverDX team today.