Companies today want to leverage their data to support business intelligence (BI) initiatives, but without the proper data connectivity processes and tools in place, that data could remain locked in silos. Enter the Progress DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline (HDP) connectivity solution, which allows companies to securely connect cloud and on-premises data to BI tools.

The HDP solution can not only be used to connect data internally, but can also be utilized by SaaS vendors to connect third-party data and reporting tools so they can deliver more value to their customers.

For example, Onit, a company that helps companies manage their legal workflows, was finding that customers often would want to bring in their own reporting tools, often requiring custom work to set it up.

Onit made an investment in the HDP solution as a way to be able to provide more benefits to its customers without needing to constantly build custom integrations. Thus, Onit started running the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution in its own environment and provides a REST API interface—OData—to securely share hosted data with its customers and have those customers utilize their own reporting software, explained Aaron Burg, Principal Sales Engineer at Progress.

“The nice thing with REST APIs is you don’t have to distribute anything, and all the BI tools already know how to interface with it automatically,” said Burg.

RELATED CONTENT: Breaking down data silos: The power of Microsoft Fabric and Progress DataDirect

MHC is another customer that has had success with using the HDP solution for connectivity. Its NorthStar document automation platform is used by more than 1,000 customers across a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing and retail.

MHC began using HDP data connectivity about three years ago when it built a cloud version of the NorthStar platform. According to Tom McMahon, Senior Architect of the platform at MHC, it was easy for customers who already stored their data in the cloud to switch to the cloud application, but in order to support customers who only keep their data on-premises, a solution was needed to enable the cloud application to get access to that data.

“We decided to do a proof of concept on the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution,” McMahon said. “It was straightforward to set up and get it up and running. It looked like it would address many requirements without a lot of work on our side to integrate into our system—and that’s when we decided to move forward with Progress.”

Dennis Bennett, Principal Sales Engineer at Progress, said that a lot of these customers with on-premises data are in highly regulated industries, and so using Progress’ on-premises connector provides them with greater confidence that their data is safe.

According to Bennett, the DataDirect connector is a lightweight agent that gets installed behind the customer’s firewall and then creates connections with the cloud-hosted version of the HDP solution that MHC is running. “It will all be outbound connectivity, so it’ll be initiated from that agent behind the firewall,” he said.

According to Burg, it’s easy to get started with a proof of concept using Progress DataDirect’s free trial, and a company could be up and running with that in a matter of a few hours.

“We give you free pre-sales support to get it running, so there’s a low investment to try the HDP solution and get a feel for how it works. You can choose one or two of your customers and do a small pilot project where you get some feedback from them so they can see that it’s useful in their environment, and from there, you can decide if you want to scale that out to a wider audience,” Burg said.