Dataware for Zero-Copy Integration with Dan DeMers from Cinchy
The special guest of this episode is Dan DeMers, Co-Founder and CEO at Cinchy. He’s also the president of the not-for-profit Data Collaboration Alliance. Prior to founding Cinchy, Dan worked in financial services in IT for some of the largest banks in the world. It was there where he met his current co-founder and saw firsthand how complicated building, maintaining, and supporting enterprise systems in complex organizations is. Listen in to learn more about how Cinchy is changing the future of data management.
You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in…
- What is Dataware? [03:01]
- Zero copy integration [06:59]
- Clearing up data terms [13:02]
- Database vs. data network [18:07]
- Changes in the data environment [27:38]
- What is Cinchy? [38:36]
- Starting your journey to Dataware [41:21]
- The Data Collaboration Alliance [45:58]
The beginning of Dataware
Dataware is a concept that goes back to about 1986 in a book by Gordon Everest. One of the chapters predicted that data would become independent of the applications. Up until that point, and largely even today, data exists because it’s created by an application. Then that data is shared across applications. Dataware is centered around a number of aspects, and can be considered as a humanization of data.
Getting away from integrated systems
Today, applications provide a simulation of a data experience. However, the applications are limited by the application code rather than people interacting directly with the data. The interaction is with the application experience, which could be reports, a GUI or a mobile app, then that is implemented with code or configuration which then interacts with the data. The app, in many ways, becomes a barrier that separates the user from the data.
The problem lies in the limited interaction with the data. Some things can’t be accomplished if the experience being used doesn’t have a code path. The data is limited because the experience contains only a silo of data. From an end-user perspective, the problem is that every interface is limited in terms of functionality and data; there’s no universal interface. Because the data is contained inside individual applications, the people building and supporting those systems would need to integrate them. While people want integrated systems, they don’t want to do it because it’s costly.
The Dataware movement
The concept of Dataware is something as big as the invention of software. Done right, it will cause a massive shift globally, and many companies can start now. The time for each organization to act is when buying, building, and integrating software.
As a company grows, it begins small, builds a team, and starts an application. But as that succeeds, the company will have to replicate that success. The problem becomes, how will it govern that scale? The answer is where the concept of the data mesh comes in, creating and managing data as a product and organizing it into domains. Those domains can be in a hierarchy, but then individual datasets need the controls and the metadata to be contained within it to enable universal access. In many ways, Dataware is the combination of these concepts.
Resources & People Mentioned
- Cinchy
- Data Collaboration Alliance
- Gordon Everest — Professor Emeritus — University of Minnesota
- Dave McComb — Board Member — Avantologie
Connect with Dan DeMers
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