Q&A with CData Director of Product Management Jaclyn Wands: What’s New with Sync

As enterprises modernize their operations, data integration remains a pivotal engine behind data-driven decision making. CData Sync is driving the next generation of data-driven business with simple, yet powerful ETL and ELT tooling.

Jaclyn Wands, CData Director of Product Management, took some time with us to share what is in store for our latest CData Sync release, and what our Product team is working on for the future. This inside look into the latest CData Sync updates includes:

• Single sign-on (SSO),
• Microsoft Teams & Slack notifications,
• dbt Cloud support,
• dbt Core GitHub support, and
• Transformations in destinations.

1.  Can you give us a bit of background on your role here at CData and how you support Sync?

Wands: I was originally brought on to the CData product team in April of this year to coordinate the marketing-sales-product-engineering handshake for CData Sync and CData DBAmp. Specifically, I’m coordinating our teams to move forward as a larger unit with everyone on the same page — keeping all our goals visible and achievable.

2.  What CData Sync updates can users expect and why are you excited about them?

Wands: Our 2022 version of CData Sync is very exciting. We're doing some basic maintenance, making sure that Sync boasts the highest security features and is as easily accessible as possible with features like single sign-on (SSO).

We’re also making integration with your systems more seamless, automated, and scalable with the addition of Microsoft Teams & Slack notifications. These automated notifications will push alerts on job failures to users’ preferred platform, meaning data owners can easily see when a data workflow needs attention and take action, instead of spending unneeded time on administrative tasks.

In addition, we’ve refined the ability to pull out and manipulate data in a way that works for our users’ workflow with the expanded transformations in destinations feature.

Another update I'm psyched about due to my data science background, is the in-depth integration with dbt Core GitHub and dbt Cloud. Users can now leverage dbt’s advanced data transformation opportunities and automate administrative tasks directly within CData Sync. This expanded integration allows users to seamlessly work where they handle their data movement, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

Learn more about how customers can take advantage of CData Sync and dbt together in our upcoming webinar, Easily Replicate Disparate Cloud and On-Premises Data with dbt and CData. with dbt Labs Head of Technology Partnerships Nikhil Kothari and CData Product Marketing Manager Matt Springfield.

Register today

3.  What spurred the move towards our deeper partnership with dbt?

Wands: One of our main goals with CData Sync is to allow anyone in our tool to more easily perform their job from a single place.

CData Sync has what you might call a “nervous system of data” where we can get signals from A-Z, while dbt has some advanced transformation capabilities that users want. Now, users can connect dbt to CData Sync through their API. This allows for dynamic selection of dbt projects in Sync and gives customers more power over their data pipeline actions in a single user interface. Deepening our partnership with dbt ultimately makes CData Sync’s data pipelines more powerful for users.

Register for our webinar with dbt Labs on November 17 to learn more.

4.  How do you anticipate customers will use these features?

Wands: Ultimately, we want CData Sync customers to spend less time in our tools. We know they need their data integration processes to simply work so they can spend more time with other important tasks at their job, and we’re working to make that happen.

It’s been reported that today’s data scientists still spend somewhere around 45% of their time cleaning and moving data. But even in my prior experience as a data scientist, I was spending well over 65% of my time cleaning data.

Users need to quickly start building their machine learning models or integrating their systems so their data lives where they need it the most. If users have streamlined, automated systems in place, they’re no longer having to manually clean and move their data.

For instance, our dbt Cloud integration gives users source-to-destination visibility to make sure that data looks exactly as needed to run any of their machine learning models on it. Then Slack notifications allow individuals to monitor for job failures — without systematically touching terabytes and petabytes of data in a way that is cumbersome and unscalable for any large enterprise.

We think CData Sync’s new features will help users reduce their time spent on manual work by at least half. Sync is freeing your data engineers, your data scientists, and your machine learning engineers to focus on the high-value projects that they're hired for. CData Sync and all of it’s future features have many goals in mind but we are always working towards helping companies free up existing resources’ time resulting in reducing the need for new headcount and saving money for those companies.

5.  What does the roadmap look like in the coming months for Sync?

Wands: During my first year, I was able to do a deep analysis of support tickets and enablement across all of our teams to shape the future of CData Sync. One of the things that I'm focusing our teams on is an entire user interface (UI) redesign.

CData Sync’s user experience (UX) is going to be like night and day thanks to our hard-working team of UX designers we just hired this past year. We're also taking in even more direct feedback from our top power users before releasing the UI redesign to the market. Getting to work with these brilliant designers and engineers to make our UI completely accessible to all types of users is exciting.

For the wider 2023 roadmap, we’re expanding our testing modules and checking stability. Additionally, we’re planning on reimagining a deploy-and-install that’s going to bring some really awesome modernization to the user experience. I'm really pumped to be a part of the team getting to put that out to market.

When someone thinks about moving their data, I want CData Sync to be a household engineering name. I will consistently use my own experience as a data scientist to make sure that we achieve that goal.

Get Started with CData Sync Today

Register today for our upcoming webinar for a deeper look at how CData Sync and dbt are empowering you to do more with your data integrations.

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