Moving Beyond Data Integration with Data Collaboration

Chapter 3. Approaches for Data Collaboration

At this point, you know what data collaboration means conceptually and which problems it solves. But we haven’t yet discussed specific approaches to enabling data collaboration or looked at tools and platforms that actually enable data collaboration with few, if any, application-specific integrations.

That’s the purpose of this chapter. In the following sections, you’ll learn about four major platforms that businesses can use today to make data available to all applications and services without extensive application-specific integrations (or, in two of these cases, no integrations at all). One of the vendors behind those platforms is us—Cinchy—and additional offerings come from Microsoft Dataverse, K2view, and The Modern Data Company.

As you’ll learn, not all of these platforms totally eliminate the need to build data integrations for individual applications. However, even where integrations are necessary, these platforms simplify the hands-on integration process, which in turn streamlines an organization’s ability to achieve seamless data collaboration. And in other cases, these platforms enable totally integration-free data collaboration.

We also want to be clear that none of the platforms that we chapter compare in this chapter are uniformly better or worse than the others. Instead, each solution exemplifies a different take on data collaboration. Some rely more heavily than others on data abstractions and virtualizations. Some work ...