Better Data: Progress’ Acquisition of MarkLogic Is a Win for Customers

I’ve been with MarkLogic for years in many capacities and collaborate with nearly every team of data experts and innovators. This gives me a keen perspective on why the Progress acquisition is a win for customers. In a world driven by smart decisions, bringing Progress and MarkLogic capabilities together will accelerate our customers’ ability to gain meaningful value from their data. Here’s why that matters.

Making Data Work

Data is vitally important for nearly every business function and good decisions should be driven by good data. But having siloed data across a business prevents innovation. When data is compartmentalized, teams can’t share information. A SQL-only approach means businesses miss out on a world of valuable data, that could provide a more complete view to help run organizations better.

Bringing Progress’ structured capabilities together with the MarkLogic multi-model data platform and semantic metadata management features gives a complete view of data that’s so important for today’s customers. Before the acquisition, we’d begin a customer conversation and realize we needed to partner with someone to have the full data stack. Now that we’re part of Progress, we can show customers a more comprehensive vision of the change they want to accomplish with their business and have the tools to deliver more of this with in-house expertise.

For instance, the MarkLogic data platform ingests data as-is, so customers don’t have to perform ETL up front. It makes it that much easier to get data straight to experts, so they have the information they need to make sound decisions. Combined with Semaphore, they can then create and apply metadata, adding context, meaning and insight into the data. Suddenly, data becomes smart. Content becomes smart content. Whatever question arises, the available data is now more intelligent. And as a result, business decisions are more intelligent too. Combining this with Progress’ data connectivity tools accelerates access to this data for downstream applications. This means customer data is delivering more value, quicker.

Making Artificial Intelligence Smarter

I was recently asked what important theme or trend lies ahead that our new Progress|MarkLogic team will be working on with customers. I believe this will be artificial intelligence (AI), enabled by smart data. When many people think of AI, they lose sight of the critical importance that data hygiene plays in properly training AI engines. The cleaner data we use today, the better, more accurate—and more powerful—tomorrow’s AI will be. I like to use a medical use case as an example. If we input medical textbook data into an AI system, say one book from 1970, and one from 2021, the one from the 70s may be favored because it has more references to the user’s query, and hence, more digital authority. But that could well be wrong. Recent medical advances have far surpassed the learning from 50 years ago. Without that human-derived context, however, the AI spits out data based on faulty inputs. This makes it critical to cleanse and enhance data before we train AI. As the adage goes: garbage in, garbage out. This certainly applies to AI as well.

MarkLogic capabilities provide this keen strategic value for companies. We give customers the power to plan, manipulate and use their data as never before, confident it’s accurate and reliable. Just ask us about our data governance, management and classification features.

Putting Customers—and Their Data—First

The incoming Customer Success team at MarkLogic has been dedicated to understanding, supporting and advocating for customers—with great results. We’re a critical part of driving a successful customer experience, connecting customers with the experts they need. Meanwhile, we are also their voice, elevating their needs, desires and interests across the company. These deep and collaborative relationships have earned MarkLogic a customer retention rate far north of 90%. As someone new to Progress, I’m energized to continue our unwavering commitment to delivering value for the customer and to increasing customer satisfaction still higher.

With data only increasing in importance, it’s essential that customers have meaningful ways to access and use their organization’s information. In conversation after conversation, our customers realize they must do more with their information. By becoming more data-centric in their decision making, and diving beneath surface insights, they’ll be able to accelerate growth and set the pace of innovation for others to follow.

But that starts with having a single data platform they can use to run their business, interrogate their business and provide the insights needed to innovate quicker, while having advanced data security throughout. Databases need to be secure—not just when data is in transit, not just when encrypted, but also at rest. Bad actors abound but being diligent about security practices can go a long way towards helping practitioners sleep at night. Thankfully, we do.

Talk to Us

Our open communication approach means we love talking to customers, partners and our own colleagues too. We’re always open to help develop new ideas that solve business challenges and provide new opportunities. Our multidisciplinary approach enables us to pull the best minds together to brainstorm solutions. And now that we’re part of a global leader in Progress, our pool of bright minds has only widened. I can’t wait to see the amazing ideas we create together.

If you have an idea, challenge or opportunity you would like to discuss, feel free to reach out to me at philip.miller@progress.com and I’ll connect you to the data experts that can accelerate your progress.