Data Virtualization: Enabling Faster Mobile App Development & Actionable Data Access

- Suresh Chandrasekaran, Senior VP North American at Denodo, says:

In their 2013 technology trends, both Gartner and Forrester have claimed that mobile devices will soon surpass the PC to become the primary mode of data access. As mobile apps now power both BI and operational/workflow engagements, many companies struggle to create an agile app development environment. This is due to challenges with discovering and delivering data assets and ensuring a high quality user experience in accessing and interacting with timely, actionable data. Data Virtualization (DV) allows companies to address these challenges by providing data connectivity and delivery capabilities.

Mobile app developers face challenges in working with short time windows to build apps while ensuring a good user experience. Let’s look at an asset management firm for example. When building a portfolio management app, developers must discover and leverage sources like internal funds, CRM, accounting, market feeds etc., and deliver data in the right format for app consumption. The Linked Data Services (LDS) capability provided by DV allows data entities, like portfolio, fund, fund manager, in the virtual layer to be browsed like the web, thus enabling developers to quickly discover and leverage data sources. DV also allows publishing data in multiple formats and writing back to data sources which reduce custom coding, thus making app development faster. 

App developers improve the user experience through LDS, as this capability increases flexibility in interacting with data, and ensures that only relevant data is shown on the small phone screen with links for further drill down. Furthermore, by enabling real-time data delivery, DV provides actionable data to users.

DV capabilities have helped companies reduce their app development times by several thousand hours while increasing flexibility of access for users. So, as more apps are being developed, DV enabled reusable data services are becoming critical to increasing business agility.