Can you tell us more about DataPhos platform?
We recently launched our first commercial product, a data platform called Dataphos. Dataphos is our approach to addressing the issues we see across many organisation’s data layers. Typical data platforms are usually very centralised, making them slow to change, expensive to manage and very complex. Here at Syntio, we believe that there must be a better approach. We want to reduce the complexity, meaning companies can adapt or create new systems much faster to facilitate changing business needs, while also reducing the costs.
When we looked at what would be important to companies in the near future, we realised that off the shelf real-time data platforms don’t yet exist, and so, we took the opportunity and created one. What we ended up with, is a system that has multiple components that work together seamlessly. It can ingest data for existing systems or new data sources, ingesting data in real-time, assessing any changes to the structure to avoid dependencies between systems, and then, put that data in a data lake for data science, AI or ML use cases, whilst also making data available for transactional systems. This covers most data use cases that companies have, while still being very easy to implement and operate… and best of all it’s free for commercial use! A module to keep track of the data structure over time has also been added, meaning that you can assess how the data changes. This is very important for data modelling, as it means we can inform data consumers when their data structures change, drastically reducing the amount of time spent managing dependencies between systems. Dependency management is very time consuming and costly for all organisations, and so it was also something we wanted to address.
Can each stream of the platform work independently of other streams?
Each component, or module, of the platform works together in perfect harmony. However, we realised that each component, ingestion, data lake building, and data schema registry had value in their own right. Therefore, they can all be used independently. You can build the data platform using the modules you need, rather than being forced to use all of it, as you would with traditional vendors.
How much time did you spent and how many people have worked on development of the plaftorm?
We created Dataphos over the last 2 years, with up to 30 data engineers in the different phases of development, though, it’s been in the pipeline much longer. Our professional services and consultancy business over the years have been faced with solving the same challenges over and over, and when we assessed this, we realised that there was a gap in the market that was being filled by bespoke development. Rather than keep making the same individualized tailor-made system over and over, we decided to make an off-the-shelf solution, meaning that our customers get a solution to their challenge much quicker, and of course, much cheaper. You could say that Dataphos is the result of real-world challenges faced by real customers. This is not something we dreamt up in isolation, it came about by facing these issues time and time again. We hope that our future customers can enjoy the benefits and savings that Dataphos can provide.
As mentioned above, the benefits of using Dataphos should be apparent: the acceleration of creation of new data platforms, especially in a Data Mesh transformation. Add to that the benefits of quicker time to market for systems and services, and the cost savings of the Dataphos platform compared to traditional platforms. When customers can save huge amounts of both time and money to solve their data challenges by using Dataphos, why wouldn’t they go and download it? It seems a no-brainer to us.
Syntio was recently in London on a conference to present Data Mash – what is it?
Syntio recently attended one of the premiere data conferences, Big Data LDN, in the UK. Our CEO, Davorin Cetto, was invited to talk about Data Mesh. Data Mesh is a new paradigm for managing data within an organisation. It promotes the decentralisation of data platforms, where each business domain becomes responsible for publishing the data that they create. This published data can then be shared across the organisation to enable that data to create value for users as quickly and cheaply as possible. This approach enables business agility and reduces the reliance on centralised, and typically slow to change, legacy data platforms. Davorin’s talk was especially interesting as this is an area that we have been active in for a while, as Syntio is working with many customers on actually implementing this new paradigm. Adding to this, our new dataphos platform was created with Data Mesh in mind and enables the technical side of the approach.
