Adaptive
Enhancing the Value Proposition of Data

Organizations generate and distribute data continually across various departments, systems, and platforms (both in cloud and on-premise). As such, it has become crucial for them to take data management initiatives to understand and control its flow. By rendering data as a strategic asset and performing comprehensive data management and analysis, companies can transform their operations for the better. Yet, it may prove challenging to manage and analyze massive swaths of data. Companies may lack time or the right technology to achieve the same. Moreover, with the rapidly evolving governance, risk and compliance (GRC) landscape, organizations are under pressure to maintain policies, procedures and controls for their data.

To this end, Adaptive—as experts in data management and governance since 1997— helps companies enrich data as their systems evolve. The company’s mature data analytics and governance platform allows organizations to locate where data is stored, to define what it means, and to understand how it flows and transforms. Their solutions provide unique functional capabilities in data governance, data quality, metadata management, enterprise architecture management, and IT portfolio management. They have an innovative product line consisting of their flagship product¬–Adaptive Report Analytics and Consolidation Engine (RACE), and other offerings such as Business Glossary Manager, Adaptive Metadata Manager™, Adaptive Enterprise Architecture Manager, and Adaptive IT Portfolio Manager.

In this interview with CIO Applications’ editorial team, Jeff Goins, the CEO of Adaptive, a veteran in enterprise technology, talks at length about the problems that businesses face while analyzing and maintaining data and how the company is delivering innovative solutions.

As the CEO of Adaptive, you have been in constant interaction with the leading CIOs and CEOs of organizations, who come to you for data analytics solutions. What are some of the recurrent problems that they face, and how has Adaptive positioned itself accordingly?

Today, regulators are introducing new and stringent mandates to ensure data privacy and security. For instance, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe enables people to have more control over personal data and simplifies the regulatory environment for international business. Similarly, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) enhances the privacy and protection of consumer data. Organizations are required to ensure “reasonable security procedures and practices” in protecting consumer data, failing to which they must suffer penalties. In such a scenario where data security has such importance, companies approach us, with their difficulty of understanding the source of their organizations’ data. Basically, they face this trouble due to their perspective of looking at data, which is very siloed. Nonetheless, as within any organization, data keeps on transporting and transmitting from one platform to another, or from one application to another, it becomes complex for anyone to streamline the data into a proper lineage. Consequently, they lose control over transmitting, managing or governing the data flowing within the organization, which, in turn, compromises its quality as well as the security.

At Adaptive, we provide an automated capability to link the relationships between the data by tagging, harvesting, and parsing it. We enable our clients to look at data governance on a holistic scale to include all data sources. We enable our clients to look at data governance on a holistic scale. For instance, in an organization, the Chief Data Officer (CDOs) or Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), may look at the data differently, standing in their respective roles. We have a platform where these various roles and stakeholders can interact with each other and have better visibility of their data and its network. A key unique value proposition about Adaptive is how we leverage the use of graph-based technology, which incorporates AI and machine learning, to combine metadata within the actual data. Leveraging our solutions, organizations can eliminate the risky, time-consuming, and expensive side of managing corporate information.

Adaptive has a unique product named Adaptive Report Analytics and Consolidation Engine (RACE), which enables organizations to understand their enterprise reports and map the data fields in those reports to the source of the data. This enables data stewards to also look at terms and their corresponding definitions and rules including the use of ontologies to have a complete inventory of what they are utilizing and where there are inconsistencies and redundancies on a holistic scale. This provides a tremendous asset to the organization for learning, knowledge transfer and a process to ensure accuracy in their reporting capabilities.

As an application, RACE enables organizations to leverage business semantics by harvesting and reporting metadata, linking to business semantics, analyzing and rationalizing report redundancies. It leverages an automated process that works on the cloud or premise to identify and manage report optimization and consolidation. In addition, it also serves as a great application for sharing information within the organization, enabling governance capabilities.

Can you narrate a few use cases of Adaptive’s solutions, where you were able to bring operational and strategic success for its clients?

Two large European financial-service companies came to us to align their data privacy programs with the GDPR mandate. We served them right in time–within just three months, we helped them in tagging their data and optimizing their data and governance platform to ultimately be able to meet the GDPR mandate. That was a great milestone we have achieved because it is nearly impossible to harvest and parse such an enormous quantity of data in such a limited time.

I would narrate another instance about a client who ran a legacy application platform that was proving to be very inconvenient to use. They were suffering losses, and their employees were leaving with key knowledge about the inner workings of the application. When they approached us, we conducted an in-depth forensics analysis by harvesting and parsing the metadata within their blackbox application. With the results we provided, the client was able to achieve a well-streamlined migration to modernization and save a tremendous amount of money that was used in maintaining the outdated application. These case-scenarios provide testimonials that when a client hires us, we put value in our work so that they don’t waste money and time.

What does Adaptive’s roadmap look like?

We have clients across various domains such as financial services, government, healthcare and real estate. Knowing that many of them lack the reference source for modeling their critical data elements, we aim to provide information models or functional models that are relevant to their respective fields. We also plan to innovate our AI and machine learning algorithms, so that we can develop more patterns and models that can be used and reused for looking at data in these various verticals. With such innovations, we aspire to create a data governance platform that will “create simplicity out of complexity” for organizations.

As organizations have become more focused on meeting the governance and compliance requirements, the market demand is rising, and our business is expanding globally. Looking ahead, we aim at building partnerships with progressive organizations so that we can sell, deliver and support the Adaptive suite of products extensively in the international market.