by Rebecca Blouin | January 21, 2025

CData Foundations 2024 Takeaways: How ISVs Are Embedding CData Connectors to Power Their Products’ Potential

Extended Connectivity blog

CData’s recent Foundations conference featured five forward-thinking ISVs that have embedded CData’s prebuilt connectors into their platforms: Google BigQuery, UiPath, APOS Systems, Klipfolio, and Stellar One. Each product leader talked about how, by handing data connectivity off to CData, they have been able to:

  • Significantly expand their customers’ connectivity options and simplify access to diverse data sources.
  • Upgrade the user experience by providing real-time data visibility, faster implementations, and self-service capabilities.
  • Make connector development and maintenance easier and more intuitive with fewer resources.
  • Advance their product roadmaps with new use cases and offerings, and scale with, and get out ahead of, customer demand.

Powering AI success with Google's BigQuery

Chai Pydimukkala, product lead of data analytics and BigQuery governance at Google, gave a keynote discussing how Google’s BigQuery platform is helping enterprises unlock the full potential of Generative AI (GenAI).

The GenAI data challenge

While 85% of organizations believe GenAI will accelerate access to insights, Chai pointed out that most face significant challenges because 66% of these organizations say that more than 50% of their data remains "in the dark." He outlined how, for AI to be effective, it requires accurate, enterprise-grade data. “AI is nothing without data,” Chai said.

The complexity of accessing diverse source systems

Chai also described why the different styles of data make the ingestion step so complex and difficult and why it’s so important to have specific domain expertise.

How Google uses embedded CData connectors to unlock data and power AI

Chai then went on to say that, by leveraging CData connectors, Google has made it easy for customers to bring in data, transform it, and then normalize it into something like star schema or snowflake schema to do their reporting.

Chai closed his keynote by talking about the CData partnership. "You need all kinds of delivery styles of data, but the data is locked away in these complex enterprise applications and databases and a lot of legacy systems. And that's where we have found an amazing partner like CData, to be able to unlock the data, bring it in, and then get you on your AI journey today.”

Harnessing the power of connectors for enhanced process mining

In his presentation, Jack Miller, senior product manager at UiPath, outlined how the company uses CData's solutions to power its Process Mining product and overcome connectivity challenges.

UiPath’s data access challenges

UiPath's Process Mining focuses on extracting system logs from platforms like SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to visualize business processes, identify inefficiencies, and improve operations through automation or reengineering.

Jack described how UiPath originally built connectors in-house but ran into challenges when they wanted to scale.

When it came to choosing a data integration partner, UiPath had three main criteria:

  • A large library of connectors, deep technical expertise, and a partnership model.
  • Connectors capable of handling high volumes of data in a reasonable timeframe.
  • Source data standardization.

As Jack explained it, “If we encountered an issue within a connector or we saw something that might impact our customers, we needed that partnership to really work in conjunction [with us] to be able to figure out issues and put forth solutions that customers would expect.”

Why UiPath chose CData

“With the 250-source library of connections, this really took the library of connectors burden off us. With 10+ million rows of performance, this allowed us to really validate that CData can perform at the levels our customers would expect.”

Jack also noted CData’s expertise in the sales cycle as well as post-sales implementation, where CData helps UiPath debug customer issues and understand what might be happening within their system.

The results for UiPath and its customers

The results of this collaboration are transformative for UiPath and its customers. Jack noted that approximately 75% of Process Mining customers license CData. “CData really helps simplify the extraction process for our customers so they can focus on the business value of the platform,” he said.

With CData’s handling data integration, UiPath has been able to turn its attention to upleveling its offerings.

“CData really takes care of our connectivity so that we can focus on our own ambitious roadmap to deliver more value to our core customer base. It allows for us to focus on more of those highly innovative AI features.”

– Jack Miller, senior product manager, UiPath

Enabling self-service modeling in SAP Analytics Cloud through live data connectivity

Next up, Allan Pym, Chief Operations Officer at APOS Systems, detailed how their partnership with CData made it possible for them to overcome connectivity challenges and enhance their APOS Data Gateway solution for SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). APOS identified the need for connectivity to address customer demands for accessing non-SAP data sources.

Why APOS chose CData

Allan explained how the buy vs. build decision was not a difficult one. They recognized right away that they weren’t in a position to build all the drivers needed to connect to all the unique data sources. And they needed to be able to quickly and easily respond to all the requests coming in from customers to connect to different sources.

“It became very clear to us the wide range of drivers that CData provides. That was a big factor…CData has coverage for most, if not all, of the items that come up for us.”

– Allan Pym, Chief Operations Officer at APOS Systems

But it wasn’t just quantity. Allan was also impressed with the quality of the CData drivers.

“We found that the quality of the CData drivers has been quite good. At a personnel level, we recognized very quickly in our discussions with CData that there was strong, deep technical expertise within the CData team. It’s critical for us and our reputation in the market to be able to have that sort of quality behind the scenes.”

Removing the connectivity barrier

Allan then described how APOS can now integrate any CData JDBC driver that’s available into their data visualization layer.

Powering product innovation

While this library of connectors has been instrumental in providing customers with more data sources, it’s also been a boost for APOS’ product innovation.

According to Allan, they’ve had some “terrific” feedback from customers about how the connectivity is working.

Empowering non-technical users and reducing internal development costs

Allan Wille, co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio, also spoke about their data integration journey and how they went from having an in-house team managing a lot of separate connectors to easily embedding CData connectors.

Allan began by talking about how Klipfolio, a data analytics and dashboard software platform that helps businesses track, analyze, and visualize their KPIs and metrics, faced challenges maintaining in-house connectors. Klipfolio originally had a team of 5-7 in-house developers responsible for building custom integrations into various systems, including Google Analytics, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Stripe. As the number of endpoints grew, the Klipfolio recognized they couldn’t keep up.

Klipfolio’s connectivity requirements

When maintaining and managing all these connectors became too expensive, Klipfolio decided to take a different approach. Klipfolio evaluated 22 vendors and ultimately chose CData for the breadth of connectors and compatible data access standards, white-labeling capabilities, and capacity to scale with user numbers and activity. According to Allan, they were also “impressed with the technical competence of the engineering team they had direct access to.”

“We love that the CData library is able to serve as this translation layer, this homogeneous layer, that we can push all of our connectors through. And because it's a library, we can embed and white label it—and all of the authentication remains with Klipfolio.”

Connectivity powers product innovation

“The CData library allowed us to scale a lot more efficiently than if we had done this in house. And we’re quite proud of the way the solution turned out and certainly our users are loving this stuff.”

Taking the pain and time out of data migration in ERP implementations

Last but certainly not least, one of the early adopters of CData’s hosted Connect Cloud platform, Scott Bickford, vice president of software engineering at Stellar One, spoke about their data integration challenges.

Stellar One is a small start-up ERP partner and reseller of Acumatica. They stumbled on a critical pain point in ERP implementations: data migration.

Why Stellar One chose CData

When faced with the build-versus-buy decision, Scott said they calculated the number of connectors that we would have to build and maintain and realized it was virtually impossible. They decided to outsource connectivity to CData.

“The movement of data can happen behind the scenes using the Powered by CData functionality. I like that it’s effortless.”

– Scott Bickford, Vice President of Software Engineering, Stellar One

Watch these sessions to learn more

You can watch the full-length videos of these sessions here: