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Despite what you may have heard building a Data Fabric isn't your only option.  You can buy a unified, all-in-one Data Fabric to is ready to use today. Avoid wasting millions of dollars and years of effort trying to build your own Data Fabric.

Attention Data Leaders & Architects!

Should You Buy or Build a Data Fabric?

No, building a Data Fabric isn't your only option.  Despite what you have heard from analysts or what you have read from other vendors, you CAN buy a ready built Data Fabric that checks all of the boxes.  The question is should you and why would you want to?

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The biggest misconception is that a Data Fabric is merely a framework, NOT a product.  But there's no reason why it can't be a product.  Most vendors will say that a Data Fabric cannot be a product because the capabilities fo a Data Fabric is not found in 1 current / legacy solution. 

 

This is true.  The Data Fabric is a NEW evolution in data management that challenges the existing thinking where companies must buy and integrate multiple products in an expensive deployment before they can get value from their data.  If this sounds familiar, it should.  This is because the idea of building a Data Fabric from multiple products is not so different than this current approach is known as the Modern Data Stack, as coined by Andreesen Horowitz.​

Unified data infrastructure architecture according to a16z (Andreesen Horowitz)

Source: Andreesen Horowitz

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But, does this work for you?

This approach typically works well for large companies with large data teams with more than sufficient financial and people resources.  It has been successfully implemented in those companies because they also have very complex existing workflows and polices .  

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But, if you are not one of the fortunate few who have large data teams with large budgets and can wait for years to actually extract value from your data tools, then the Data Fabric approach may make more sense.  Below is an architectural diagram from Gartner on what a Data Fabric is:

Data fabric architecture according to Gartner

Source: Gartner

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Notice how this approach gives customers ONE Integrated and Unified solution that before required separate solutions across:

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  1. Metadata

  2. Governance

  3. Data prep

  4. Data integration

  5. Active metadata

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So to recap, how should organizations think about whether they should buy a ready-to-go Data Fabric versus building a Data Fabric by themselves?

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  • Money - Your organization has ample budget to not only purchase multiple point solutions but also the budget to pay for large and complex professional services / integration engagements.

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  • Staff - Your organization has ample and deep technical resources in house who are comfortable working with multiple open source tools, doing complex data integration, and can 

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  • Time - Your organization has up to 2 years to evaluate, procure, install, integrarte and deploy multiple separate solutions.

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  • Legacy Process MUST stay - Your organization has many teams with siloed processes that require a lot of manual intervention so that automation is not ideal.

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But, for everyone else, a Data Fabric may be an easier, faster, and more cost effective alternative to modern data management.

Kaycee-Lai-copy_sized.jpg

Kaycee Lai​

CEO & Founder

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