Fireside Chat with CData SVP, Cloud - Mike Albritton: What’s New with CData

We recently had an insightful conversation with Mike Albritton, the Senior Vice President of Cloud at CData. On the heels of our latest product release, Mike gave us the inside scoop into strategic initiatives propelling the Connect Cloud roadmap and gained valuable insights into the latest product releases as well as those on the horizon.

Explore the interview details below to access the latest insights on CData Connect Cloud.

Watch the short video below to hear from Mike:

What industry trends drive the Connect Cloud product roadmap in 2023?

Data culture has been on the rise for several years. Organizations are prioritizing data and analytics, promote data-driven decision-making, and empower employees to use data to track goals and KPIs. This drives the need for organizations to provide the necessary tools, training, and access to the data.

The Connect Cloud roadmap includes several features to promote data culture – improving the user experience, enabling data sharing, and enabling users to use client tools and applications to access data from anywhere.

Technology and data management concepts evolve rapidly. In February 2023, Forrester Research introduced Data Fabric 2.0, which is closely related to CData’s concept of data virtualization for the cloud.

What is data virtualization for the cloud?

In Q3 this year, we launched a fully managed SaaS solution that allows users to build a virtual logical data layer across various cloud applications. It centralizes governance and control of data connections, sets granular data access controls, and monitors data connectivity consumption across your enterprise.

Any notable Connect Cloud updates you want to share?

We have released a lot of features this year that I’m really excited about.

• API Connector: We recently launched a feature that allows you to create connections from CData Connect Cloud to any data source that has an API.
• Datasets: Coming in late October, this is a data marketplace of sorts where you can share data across the organization and curate datasets, and it’s going to make it easy for business users inside of an organization to access their data.
• AI Text-to-SQL: Allows users write normal language text, and it will generate SQL based on the metadata that those users have.
• Excel write-back capabilities: Improvements to our Excel Add-in gives users the ability to pull live data into a spreadsheet, make changes, and push those changes back to the data source.
• Certifications: We have certified CData Connect Cloud with IBM Cognos and Microsoft Power BI, so now if you are using either tool, you can access data from any application directly within the interface.

What does the roadmap for CData Connect Cloud look like in the coming months?

Right now, we are working on several very large features we are excited to get to customers. First, Caching is a very important feature that’s going to allow quick access to data from APIs that are slow to respond or may have API access limitations. We’re also working on a new way to connect to CData Connect Cloud with Open API support.

Finally, we’re working on packaging a new version of CData Connect Server. This is going to have the same look and feel as Connect Cloud, and it’s going to make it easier for customers to run Connect Server on their own infrastructure – whether it's on-premises or in their own private cloud.

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