Supernova Award Category
The Problem
Historically, integration and data management teams have operated in silos. Considering that these teams must work with the same varied data sources and APIs, this approach introduces inefficiency and redundancy, making it difficult to mine data for decisions. Liaison launched ALLOY to eliminate data silos and address disruptive challenges further exacerbating the siloed approach. These challenges include:
1) Big data - Disparate, unstructured data sources are increasing integration complexity. Juniper Research reports that there will be 38 billion IoT devices by 2020 and Domo records 250 million Facebook posts per hour.
2) Cloud deliver and splintering of ERP solutions - More applications are being moved to the cloud, while others remain on premises. Hybrid environments produce more silos. Also there are more endpoints to integrate than ever before. Netskope reports that enterprises now average 917 cloud applications.
3.) Resource scarcity - IT talent to oversee integration is becoming harder to find. The Harvey Nash Tech Survey revealed that 53% of IT hiring managers reported skills shortages in 2015.
4.) Compliance – The complexity of maintaining compliance with increasingly strict data security and privacy regulations continues to escalate, along with the cost of breaches. An IBM study found the average cost of breaches to be $4 million in 2016, up 30% since 2013.
The Solution
Liaison saw a shift to a data-centric business model among transformative companies and the opportunity for all organizations to apply this model, which leverages insights gained from data to initiate innovation. To become data-centric, organizations would need a new approach to integration and data management – one that eliminates silos, addresses the new big data and cloud-delivery environment confronting customers and meets specific needs. In developing our unified platform, we sought the latest big data technologies, focusing on 2 key areas: the software framework to store and process big data in a distributed system and the supporting computing hardware. We conducted proof of concept to measure performance and reliability of Apache Hadoop. MapR excelled with enterprise-grade features such as hardening and no single point of failure. We selected MapR after rigorous review because MapR brought added scale, performance and flexibility, enabling us to tailor for customer use cases.
The results
As the first dPaaS, ALLOY is disrupting how integration and data management are delivered within Liaison and industry wide. Customers are benefiting from a solution tailored to meet their needs. With the unified platform, users are solving more business problems with less overhead. ALLOY is replacing point-to-point integration between applications with a new data-centric approach so that users gain agility to manage more integrations and tackle all integration patterns. Users can manage data from many disparate sources and, for the first time, organically grow a single repository of quality data from and available to all applications to drive new insight. Users are mining streaming data in real-time and have full visibility into the data lifecycle for more complete reporting. dPaaS provides PaaS functionality at the point of data analysis where it matters most. Users are redirecting IT resources to more strategic projects by accessing fully managed services for data integration mechanics, and are easing security and compliance burdens by leveraging ALLOY’s inherent compliance and security. With ALLOY’s support for MapR Hadoop distribution, users are invoking a cloud-based data repository within the context of a larger data management framework instead of having to invest in infrastructure to deploy and manage those repositories on premise. Customers benefit from a scalable multi-tenant solution with iron-clad security that only MapR’s support for multi-tenancy can provide.
Metrics
Liaison experienced 41% CAGR during the last 8 years offering innovations in B2B integration and pioneering the industry’s data management capabilities. At age 16, our goal is to continue to build our brand, share our expertise at scale with a growing customer base and increase our contract values. With ALLOY’s introduction, we have increased share of voice by 87%, average deal size 86% and generated 59% more leads.
Healthcare is just one industry where our dPaaS model is taking hold. A premier university healthcare system sought to become a certified Accountable Care Organization in order to receive value-based reimbursement incentives from Medicare and improve care quality. With ALLOY’s data-centric approach and unified platform, this Liaison customer is now integrating and managing patient records from across 120 sources (internal and external) and has begun to manage more than 10,000 lives through its ACO program. The customer achieved ACO reporting and efficiency requirements, improved clinical outcome tracking, enhanced access to up-to-date, accurate data among providers and improved the security of patient records with a comprehensive, tailored solution on ALLOY’s HIPAA-secure platform. We have also helped a large pharma company blend sentiment data from social media feeds, giving them new business insight, and helped a Fortune 50 company consolidate 15 ERP systems in product catalogs into a single instance in the Cloud, managing data for 1.2 million different SKUs.
The Technology
ALLOY is built upon an advanced microservices architecture. New functionality can be quickly added by standing up microservices instead of altering a monolithic platform. Polyglot persistence handles diverse data types, and automated mapping accelerates implementation. MapR-FS and MapR-DB create ALLOY’s distributed data platform. Kappa architecture enables rapid stream and batch processing. Kafka maintains an Immutable Log and data is materialized on demand through schema-on-read technology.
Disruptive Factor
Revolutionizing our platform and making it available to more customers is energizing functions across Liaison. Currently, more than 25% of our resources are focused on this initiative. A key challenge to adoption has been fitting dPaaS to RFPs. Many customers are invested in application-centric legacy approaches and are still seeking a data warehouse or a full MDM solution rather than a tailored, data-centric approach. We have helped them see the need for a more future-proof solution and extended their legacy investment by gradually migrating to ALLOY’s modern architecture.
As enterprises must move to a data-centric model, dPaaS will continue to challenge the status quo. DIY, point-to-point approaches such as EAI/ESB and IPaaS can’t keep up with big data and cloud requirements. They leave the burden of building integrations to the organization, create redundancy and silos, cannot scale quickly enough and present governance and compliance issues. We are the first to deploy a unified, secure, future-proof platform with managed services for integration and data mechanics to address these challenges. As the center of data gravity shifts, Liaison expects to help bridge repositories running in the cloud and on premise. We believe IaaS, PaaS and SaaS will soon be superseded by dPaaS. A multi-tenant solution is the optimum architecture, but only if each customer’s data can be secured. MapR’s multi-tenancy support allows us to securely host several customers on the same cluster.
Shining Moment
• Decision to use MapR distribution to support big data integration and management
• Investments from Merck and Accenture to expand ALLOY into Life Sciences market
• New unprecedently simple pricing model with no metered transaction volume
• Speeding TaaS transactions by 625%
• Strong Performer in Forrester MDM Wave
• People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Product; Stevies for New Product of Year, Stratus Award for Cloud Integrator and Golden Bridge Awards for Best Product of Year