Top 5 Questions from the "Ask Me Anything" Webinar with the DataDirect Partner Deltek

Learn more about Deltek's partnership with DataDirect and how Deltek uses DataDirect for its customers.

Recently I hosted a webinar with Aaron Burg, Solutions Engineer with DataDirect, and Chris Knight, Vice President of Product Management with Deltek. This webinar was a little different than some of our more traditional webinars as we wanted audience participation. As a result, we got some tips from Chris regarding their partnership with us, and more specifically, how they use DataDirect for their customers.

To give a little background on Chris Knight and Aaron Burg:

As vice president of Product Management, Chris Knight leads Deltek’s cloud product strategy. With over 20 years of experience in the development, management and growth of software-as-a-service solutions, Chris is focused on all aspects of the Deltek cloud to provide a smooth, secure and compliant end-to-end experience for customers.

Aaron Burg has been senior solutions engineer for Progress for four years. He has worked in the IT space for 20 years, working in network administration and data connectivity. His primary focus today is working with organizations worldwide to help them bridge the gap between data and analytics by using open standards, such as ODBC, JDBC OData/REST.

During this webcast there was time after the presentations to take questions from the audience. You can read the top five questions asked below. How did I determine the top five, you ask? Well, I picked out the ones we hear most often from our sales engagements. Hopefully they can be of value to you as you embark on finding a data connectivity partner.

So, here we go—the top five questions:

1. What is the difference between Hybrid Data Pipeline (HDP) and other DataDirect connectors available?

Aaron Burg, Progress DataDirect: Hybrid Data Pipeline is more of a data hub or a data gateway, as HDP contains connectivity using a lot of our drivers to a wide range of data sources, and organizations can access those using a single ODBC or JDBC driver or the OData REST API through it. HDP gives organizations this secure platform to have access to a wide range of sources, whether it be for the Deltek's use case, or even for internal use cases where maybe you have a BI or analytics team that needs access to data sources. You don't want to provide them with a wide range of all these different drivers individually. With HDP, you have that security and you can manage all that in one central location.

2. What tools do Deltek customers generally use with the ODBC connection?

Chris Knight, Deltek: We have customers using Tableau, Power BI, Excel, Access and really just whatever works with ODBC. Because Deltek has customers across multiple industries in different sizes, we have some very large customers that want to pull it under their data warehouse, and we have some customers that just want to open it up in Excel and run one-off queries. It's up to our customers really as we don't have a limit there. Our goal is to get them set up and get them going with the DataDirect driver, and they're off and running.

3. Did Deltek consider building their own solution when investigating data connectors?

Chris Knight, Deltek: The Deltek team looked through the different mechanisms that we could provide direct data access for our customers, and we decided on the DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline because of the security and the scalability that it offered us. We were able to manage HDP within our ecosystem, but also found it to be very easy for our customers, and fully supported. Our concern was if we hack some tools together to do it a different way, we will have to support that, right? HDP provides the connectivity, security, and support - which is a good, sweet spot for us.

4. Is Hybrid Data Pipeline similar or different to data virtualization?

Aaron Burg, Progress DataDirect: It's different. HDP is more of a data pipeline. For example, HDP doesn’t present the data sources as a single database in the sense of data virtualization, but does provide organizations with a way to access them independently. We do have some features that let you group data sources together with OData. Again, it's not really a logical join between them, but it's more around a specific use case that DataDirect encounters with organizations wanting to get OData access for Salesforce Connect and their external objects feature.

5. How well did Deltek support the security implementations?

Chris Knight, Deltek: Deltek has many layers within our infrastructure focused on security, firewalls, WAPs and IPSs. With that said, it was really important that Deltek had a tool that would work well with that, and that it would allow us to maintain our security posture. Also, it was very important that the data was encrypted in transit, and that it used really strong ciphers. It was important that we could turn FIPS mode for certain markets to really lock down the ciphers even further. We wanted to make sure that we didn't have to open ports for our clients or for us in crazy ways. HDP proved it really would allow us to meet our security posture regardless of what market we're in. One of those markets, in fact; is in the US government contracting space. I think we can all agree the US Government has some pretty high requirements regarding security, so it gives an indication that we're pretty comfortable with our HDP investment.

Do you have any questions for Progress DataDirect? If so, talk to an expert today. Or, if you want to learn more about how Deltek uses Hybrid Data Pipeline, watch the webinar.

Watch the Webinar