Oracle chats about the new data integrator cloud service

On February 13, Oracle unveiled Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service, Oracle’s new data integration cloud service aimed at simplifying and accelerating cross-enterprise data integration to support real-time analytics and help organizations drive better business decisions.

With the increasing need for the enterprise to be effective and agile, organizations need seamless communication and flow of data between sources and targets - data originating from IoT, Web, and business applications or data that is stored in the cloud or on premises. Oracle Data Integrator Cloud provides businesses with a high-performance, simple, and integrated cloud service to execute data transformations where the data lies, with no hand coding required, and without having to copy data unnecessarily. That's why we sat down with Jeff Pollock, VP of Product for the Oracle Data Integration pillar. Here's what he had to say.

ADM: Can you describe the Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service and what it enables organizations to do?

Pollock: This new cloud service is designed from the ground up to focus on integrating data for the analytic patterns of data management. Analytic patterns of data management are the kinds of data movement and data transformation that are required to empower Reporting, Business Intelligence, Data Marts, Data Warehouses and Data Science applications in big data. This new Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service is focused on providing data integration for these kinds of business needs.

ADM: What kind of businesses and organizations does Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service target?

Pollock: Our customers in the cloud range from large Global 2000 type business’ who are aggressively shifting towards an OpEx style of managing IT assets, as well as medium-sized business’ who are looking to start quickly with a solution that can scale up as they grow.

ADM: Why is data integration such an issue today and how does Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service address this issue?

Pollock: In today’s economy, the value of data as a tangible economic asset to the business has never been higher. Whether it is data about customers, products, marketing intelligence, or data about the internet of things, our customers tell us that they want more data, with higher trust, and with better quality than ever before.  But when data is coming from so many places, and with such velocity, the technical challenge of bringing it all together and making sense of it has never been higher.  Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service is designed to help simplify how customers can bring data together more quickly, and make sense of the data so that it can flow easily into their analytic environments.

ADM: How do you foresee customers using this new service?

Pollock: We see customers using this new service to enable more efficient data flows into Reporting, Business Intelligence, Data Marts, Data Warehouses and Data Science applications in big data. These solutions may run on the Oracle Cloud, 3rd Party Cloud services, or even on Premises and the Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service can support it all.

ADM: Why do developers need Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service?

Pollock: Oracle Data Integrator Cloud Service enables developers to be more productive, and develop quicker than they did before.

ADM: Can you elaborate on how the service helps organizations deploy projects more quickly, reduce risk, and reduce costs?

 
Pollock: The new ODI-CS has substantial automation that improves the speed of ordering, provisioning, and deployment of the platform service. Developers can leverage a fully functional API or a graphical user interface for building elaborate data integration flows that can be used to accelerate cloud data warehousing and cloud data migration projects. By offering this new service as a monthly subscription, or metered by the hour, it give our customers more ways to reduce risk and reduce costs on large projects.
 

ADM: Can you talk about how the service brings together data from different sources, particularly between Oracle and non-Oracle systems?

 
Pollock: We have a wide range of Oracle and non-Oracle data sources that this ODI-CS capability integrates with. All popular database technologies are supported and ODI-CS can directly integrate with non-Oracle cloud infrastructure. For example, if a customer wants to move data from Amazon RDS and on-premise databases (any) into a new data warehouse running in Oracle cloud, they could very easily use the ODI-CS to enable that data flow.
 

ADM: Can you talk about the importance of real-time analytics and how the solution supports that?

 
Pollock: Data management patterns are changing rapidly to accommodate the business’ demands for streaming data at higher velocity than ever before. To put it another way, batch style data management is not sufficient to drive modernization and business transformation. The new ODI-CS empowers customers to shift gears and support streaming data architecture while simplifying how developers interact with new and exotic technology. The core ODI engine supports REST, JMS, and Apache Kafka as data sources and targets, and the ETL functions for transformation can run in Spark or Spark Streaming to support very high velocity data transformations.