Incorta, maker of a data management platform that runs real-time operational analytics on raw business data, announced new capabilities and enhancements today, including real-time delta sharing compatibility and several new data apps. 

Delta sharing is an open protocol for secure real-time exchange of large datasets, which enables organizations to share data in real time, regardless of which computing platforms they use. It is a simple REST protocol that securely shares access to part of a cloud dataset and leverages modern cloud storage systems, such as S3, ADLS or GCS, to reliably transfer data.

With delta sharing, a user accessing shared data can directly connect to it through Tableau, Apache Spark, Rust, Pandas or other systems that support the open protocol, without having to deploy a specific computing platform first. Data providers can share a dataset once to reach a broad range of consumers, while consumers can begin using the data in minutes.

With this capability, San Mateo, Calif.-based Incorta joins that well-established group of data management providers. Its platform enables analysis of raw business data — which normally has to go through one or more iterations in order to be usable — to shorten the data pipeline. It directly maps to source application data, eliminating conventional transformation and aggregation steps, Matthew Halliday, Incorta cofounder and EVP of products, told VentureBeat. 

A self-service semantic layer empowers business users, enabling them to access and analyze all their data, with full transactional detail that is 100% identical to the source, Halliday said.

With its latest updates, Incorta ostensibly has improved its method of obtaining operational data from source systems and making it ready for business analysis. The newly released data apps offer prebuilt business schemas and dashboards for Oracle EBS, Oracle ERP and EPM Clouds, NetSuite, SAP and others. 

Delta sharing and flattening data

The delta sharing upgrade is a native integration that enables Incorta customers to share operational data across a variety of data platforms and solutions. The updates are now live and available to all customers, Halliday said. 

“There are a lot of challenges when you’re taking the relational dataset that resides behind an ERP (enterprise resource planning) and you’re trying to get it to kind of work for analytics because you have to transform it all to be workable,” Halliday said. “There’s data ‘flattening’ and you have to go through transformation processing in order to get the data into some kind of shape that’s usable for analytics. And that was a big bottleneck – the big pain point for many companies. So we focused on fixing that.”

Data flattening is the act of reconfiguring semi-structured data, such as name-value pairs in JSON, into separate columns where the name becomes the column name that holds the values in the rows. Data unflattening is the opposite; adding nested structure to relational data.

“The cloud is bringing an entirely new level of openness and interoperability to data analytics, and that is creating so much innovation across the entire ecosystem,” Osama Elkady, Incorta cofounder and CTO, said in a media advisory. “Delta sharing is a huge enabler of this trend.”

Apps and analytics

Data apps make it fast and easy to get operational data from source systems and prepare it for business analysis, Halliday said. The analytical blueprints eliminate the need for complex star schemas and make it easy to start analyzing operational data in a few steps with prebuilt, flexible data pipelines, effectively demystifying the traditional steps associated with turning raw operational data into business-ready data, he said.

“Every company today struggles with operational analytics. Almost nobody talks about it, but even the most advanced companies of our time — the tech titans and pioneers of ‘data-as-a-service’ — are stuck with this monkey on their back,” Halliday said. “Incorta solves this problem, and our data apps are a springboard to even faster time to insight — eliminating so much of the work needed to access, organize and present data from popular business systems such as Oracle EBS, ERP Cloud, NetSuite, SAP, JD Edwards, Salesforce and a rapidly growing number of others.”

Gartner Research groups Incorta with market competitors such as Tableau, Microsoft, Oracle, Qlik, Domo and Alteryx. 

The company is backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Kleiner Perkins, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Telstra Ventures and Sorenson Capital, while its customers include Broadcom, Vitamix, Equinix and Credit Suisse.