Liaison Technologies unveils first Data Platform-as-a-Service

Liaison has offered enterprise data integration and data management solutions for 15 years, but their new Alloy Platform features exceptionally agile micro-services architecture to handle modern data workloads and deliver the plumbing infrastructure which powers enterprise analytics.

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Manish Gupta, Liasion’s CMO

Atlanta-based data integration and data management solutions provider Liaison Technologies has announced the Alloy Platform, which they are terming the industry’s first dPaaS (Data Platform as a Service).

Liaison has been in the cloud services business since 2000, with a 100 per cent enterprise focus. They have a managed services model and 95 per cent of their revenue is services. Their 7000 customers across 46 countries range from companies with 300-400 million in revenues up to very large enterprises. Integration and data management is their business, but the vast increases in data volume make management today more and more difficult.

“Today, analytics is the sizzle, but integration and data management are the prerequisites needed to make it happen,” said Manish Gupta, Liaison’s CMO. However, Gupta said that while 99 per cent of enterprises start new integration projects every year, 86 per cent of these have delays. Moreover, while 25 per cent of IT budgets are spent on integration, 83 per cent of these projects don’t have a return on investment.

“Older technologies like the ESB [Enterprise Service Bus] model have a problem with cloud dynamics, which has led to a platform approach, but iPaaS [Integration Platform as a Service] also can’t deal with the key problem today, which is the exponential increase in data,” Gupta said. “With the Alloy Platform we are looking to solve these problems of real-time data around integration and data management, which current architectures are not solving. It takes things to the next level.”

The Liaison Alloy platform differs from other platform-as a service models because it is centred on the data model rather than applications.

“dPaas is a holistic approach focused on the data layer, which enables the enterprise to focus on data assets to get best value from data,” Gupta said. The multi-tenant platform has three building blocks including Data Orchestration, Data Persistence, and Data Visualization, and is built on a micro-services architecture with limitless scale that leverages big data technologies such as Hadoop, elastic search, and graph databases.

“We have always had the capability to integrate and offer data management,” Gupta said. “The new uniqueness here is the agile micro-services architecture, which gives us more agility, that is needed now to operate at the speed at which the huge volumes of unstructured data have to be dealt with. It transfers the plumbing-like integration to a Center of Excellence as a managed service. Our unique Contivo automated mapping engine with data profiling algorithms is also a critical differentiator for us, which can now be taken to any environment.”

Liaison has a small but diverse channel of about 35 partners, 30 of which are in North America. It includes large integrators like Accenture, with whom they have a comarketing and coselling relationship, OEMs like Ariba and Netsuite, and focused solution providers like Mississauga’s Virtual Logistics, who resell their value-added network capabilities.

“We think this should attract new partners, particularly those serving verticals with deeper domain depth because this provides the plumbing they need today,” Gupta said. “We see a layer of partners who can come in and tap into a solution for their customers in a wide variety of verticals because we provide effective API management. There is also an opportunity for white labelling this platform.”

Liaison Alloy Platform capabilities are available now.