SnapLogic, Tidemark Say Cloud Integration Will Extend EPM’s Value, Horizons 
Cloud integration is powering a new generation of cloud-optimized analytics and enterprise performance management. Tidemark’s EPM platform can access, correlate and derive insights from hundreds of data sources – in near real-time. The offering arises from an innovative partnership with cloud integration firm SnapLogic.
Cloud integration is powering a new generation of cloud-optimized analytics and enterprise performance management. Tidemark’s EPM platform can access, correlate and derive insights from hundreds of data sources – in near real-time. The offering arises from an innovative partnership with cloud integration firm SnapLogic.
Tidemark’s EPM is a unified application platform built for the cloud and is designed to let customers tap hundreds of diverse data sources, Tidemark co-founder and Nenshad Bardoliwalla told IDN.
In specific, Tidemark supports ERP-based data from Oracle and SAP, traditional RDBMS, e-commerce, XML, as well as unstructured data from text, email, audio, video, RSS feeds and streams from Twitter, Facebook and other social media.
“This explosion of data needs to managed and brought together in more intelligent and real-time ways to extract the high-value available,” Bardoliwalla told IDN. “But it has to be done without requiring a lot of cost or complex IT. That is what we see as the new opportunity for EPM.”
Tidemark’s work with SnapLogic aims to add powerful integration and data cleansing to provide customers with critical EPM benefits, including real-time metrics management; strategic, financial and operational planning; forecasting and profitability modeling, Bardoliwalla added.
“Our EPM approach is bringing analytics to the cloud to let businesses set goals, do planning and forecasting, and even sophisticated cost modeling and risk assessments across sales, operations and other parts of their business,” he added. Tidemark is initially targeting firms in manufacturing, consumer products, retail and high tech.
But Tidemark’s cloud EPM is not only about tapping into vast amounts of data to make more money or attract more customers. It’s also about using all that data to detect – and avoid – risk.
“Today, performance, risk and compliance for a company are analogous to GPS [global positioning system]. So, we also provide users scenarios and early warning signals against exceeding the speed limit,” Bardoliwalla told IDN. “We know companies all want to make more money, but they need to do it with awareness of the frameworks they operate in and with awareness of compliance factors so they can understand the full impact of decisions.”
Nenshad Bardoliwalla
Co-founder, Tidemark
Cloud Integration, EPM Can Add Up
To More than the Sum of Their Parts
Bardoliwalla sees how EPM plus integration, especially when both have a cloud perspective, can be worth more than the sum of their parts. In his career, Bardoliwalla has worked at major EPM firms, including Hyperion and SAP’s Business Objects and he brings a simple perspective: The more data the better the decisions.
“There are many [EPM] solutions that can pull data from the general ledger and then do reporting. But what about all that data outside your firewall? That data can be a crucial, but too often it’s missing,” Bardoliwalla said. “To help make sure that data is no longer missing, we’re working with SnapLogic. They understand data integration across many structured and unstructured data types. They also have a very elegant, pluggable approach, which allows us to easily plug their capability into our platform.”
The end result, Bardoliwalla added, is a win-win for Tidemark and customers. “It’s simple to us, the more data sources your EPM can tap into, the more accurate and valuable the outcomes,” he said.
Drilling into the architecture, SnapLogic is providing Tidemark EPM these key integration capabilities:
Data Integration Server. The SnapLogic Server extends traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) with discoverable, callable and reusable data services. The REST-based engine can read, transform and write data in a web format. As a result, data can be brought directly into Tidemark's environment, run completely in the cloud and offer high-performance and reliability.
SnapLogic “Snaps” and SnapStore Library. SnapLogic’s modular integration components (dubbed “Snaps”) are built for a specific application or data source. In turn, these intelligent connectors include the code and processes necessary to derive insights from multiple data sources – without requiring business or IT users to conduct complex tasks with applications, data models or web services. A library of pre-built and pre-tested “Snaps” is available from the SnapStore. For custom requirements, “Snaps” are based on an open and standardized development environment, and so are easily built or modified based on an open and standardized development environment.
SnapReduce for Hadoop. For Hadoop users, SnapReduce can transform SnapLogic data integration pipelines directly into MapReduce tasks. This feature optimized for the Tidemark’s EPM platform will make Hadoop processing much more accessible and efficient. SnapReduce is currently available as a beta offering.
Beyond the SnapLogic-powered native cloud-based data integration, Tidemark’s EPM platform provides:
- A pure HTML5 user interface that provides a real-time collaborative experience that is the same across all devices (browsers, tablets, etc.)
- A set of pre-built application components (processes, goals, dimensions, KPIs, calculations, risks and controls). Each can be flexibly combined and configured by business users.
- A parallel analytic computation engine (unconstrained by relational models or rigid cubes). It can operate over massive quantities of structured and unstructured in real-time.
- A virtualized, multi-tenant, highly reliable infrastructure built on VMware technology running in a SAS 70 type II certified data center.
Tidemark’s decision to embed SnapLogic’s integration capabilities directly into its EPM platform could prove a game changer for cloud-based EPM and analytics, according to Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe.
"Data integration has always been a challenge in the legacy analytics world. As the Tidemark EPM platform is built for the cloud, we needed a partner that had an open architecture framework that allows us to connect to virtually any other application or data source. We found that in SnapLogic," Gheorghe said in a statement.
At least one analyst familiar with the project noted the Tidemark-SnapLogic solution comes as customers are increasingly open to using cloud to gain insights from growing mountains of data and analytics.
“The information required to take actions now comes from a vast amount of structured and unstructured data found in disparate systems throughout the organization,” said R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research Inc. “[A] cloud-based data integration [to access] a full spectrum of data is a pre-requisite for next-generation performance management applications, as it significantly reduces the time to value on one of the most costly aspects of customer deployments.”
