Accur8 Software
Powered by Data Virtualization

Prior to Accur8, Glen Marchesani, President and CTO of Accur8 Software, managed an application development company called Emeris. During this entrepreneurial stint, Marchesani discovered companies were struggling to overcome their ever-growing silos of disparate data and making it consumable for business users and customers in an affordable and efficient way. “Traditional approaches to data integration that includes layers of hand coding or connectors have proven difficult to scale,” expresses Marchesani. To address this problem—and opportunity—Marchesani teamed with experienced startup investor, Ron Patterson, who serves as the company’s executive chairman, to create Accur8 Software.

“Data virtualization overcomes the complexity of backend integration, since data is unfettered by its source system, greatly easing the process of integrating data and building applications.” Marchesani and his team created a powerful data virtualization product, Accur8 Integrate which seamlessly aggregates a company’s disparate data into one single unified virtual database, regardless of source, eliminating the traditional practice.

“Our first step is to model the data sources selected to be part of the virtual data layer in a metadata repository,” states Marchesani. From there, Accur8’s query engine seamlessly handles queries and gathers data from multiple disparate data sources by stitching them together, in real-time, into a single result set (the virtual data layer). Consequently, the virtual data layer provides seamless access to the underlying data as if it were a single database without needing to deal with the complexity of integrating each underlying data source individually. “Businesses can easily access all data across all applications, whether they are legacy, on premise or in the cloud,” adds Patterson. This can include operational data, financial data, customer data, server data, social data, and more.

Powered by the data virtualization technology, Accur8 also offers a reporting and analytics tool, Accur8 Insight, with a rich set of features like reporting, dashboards, collaborative tools, alerts, strong security, and more. “For the front end of our applications, we have a self-serve application development framework that provides self-service tools to create UI screens and components that are bound to data from the virtual data layer and rendered in runtime,” states Marchesani. This in turn allows the firm and its implementation partners to seamlessly collaborate with customers to design the optimal UI/UX for their application, which can be easily modified post production.

“Collectively, this approach works alongside existing hand coded UI frameworks—greatly reducing the time and cost of building and maintaining applications compared to traditional approaches,” states Marchesani.

One of Accur8’s clients, a medical billing company needed a customized solution to handle the complexities of their backend systems, due to several acquisitions. The client was handling over 3,000 individual databases, 6,000 custom reports, and allocating 5 IT support staff to provide reporting and analytics to its customers. Accur8 created a virtual data layer that provided them unified access to all of their data stored in their 3,000 databases. They also worked with the client to provide 25 self-reporting and analytics templates that all their end-users could modify to their own requirements, without IT intervention. This led to much greater customer satisfaction and significant savings as IT staff providing support was reduced to one person allocating less than half their time.

Data Virtualization overcomes the complexity of backend integration, since data is unfettered by its source system, greatly easing the process of integrating data

“At Accur8, we take a client-driven approach to innovation. For us staying ahead means constantly listening to our customers and prospects to understand their challenges and pain points and focus on addressing their specific needs and driving real world innovation,” says Marchesani. Forging ahead, the firm continues to focus on making their integration capabilities and tools easier for use by third parties. “As well, we are looking to significantly expand the number and reach of our SI and technology partners in 2017,” concludes Marchesani.