eccenca GmbH
Semantic Data Management to Build Agile Emprises

Data velocity and variety are now paired with increasing expectations from investors and customers to see even brick and mortar companies become increasingly digital and agile. However, many companies are locking data up in silos, allowing individual applications or application vendors to remain the gatekeeper of who can access what information — ending up having data ‘landfills’ for data lakes. There is a need to evolve a practice that places foremost importance on “meaning of the data,” turning data silos into accessible, connected data inventories. eccenca — a novel ‘data as a service’ provider based out of Germany — offers the semantic data management solution that helps organizations create the logical abstraction necessary to disrupt current data challenges, reduce complexity and drive innovation. eccenca has been founded by Prof. Sören Auer, a global thought leader in the semantic web arena and a prime contributor to the Web of Data, an initiative to interlink and integrate semantic data at web scale.

The software solution eccenca Corporate Memory offers knits through big data cataloging and semantic data integration serving as foundation for analytics and BI. It provides customers with the ability to build logical data models upon a highly scalable data infrastructure leveraging technologies like Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka. The offering is wrapped by an intuitive ‘data shopping interface’ that enables users to browse and extract the data they need in terms they understand. Data meaning is conveyed with vocabularies that help to find, select and understand a piece of data from different perspectives without the need of creating physical copies.

The interface can ingest all common data sources and align itself to function based on predefined governance rules to address compliance as it simultaneously projects data both internally and externally. In layman terms, data consumers can specify their information needs and create data workflows to get their intended view of data objects either as a dataset for direct analysis or as an endpoint that can be queried or integrated with external applications.

“The semantic approach ensures that complexity and redundancy in data integration and provisioning along with the need for physical infrastructures are reduced by large margins,” remarks Hans-Christian Brockmann, CEO, eccenca.

The semantic approach ensures that complexity and redundancy in data integration and provisioning along with the need for physical infrastructures are reduced by large margins

Some of the big names such as Volkswagen, Bosch, Nokia, and Ericsson are among the eccenca’s clientele. Brockmann recalls an instance of one of their clients who had spent as much as 200,000 person days annually to identify, select and align the right data. Partnering with eccenca, the client was able to achieve a centralized data integration, cataloging and metadata management process by establishing a ‘data as a service’ team and data shopping platform. Consequently, the majority of data requests could be resolved in a streamlined, automated fashion and as a result, the time to market for the project was cut short to a fraction.

“Our software is driving the ability of our customers to track sensor data from their global supply chains to identify and predict causes for error, effectively using our solution to integrate and scale data across entire ecosystems,” says Brockmann.

Especially in fast evolving data-driven verticals such as supply chain and industry 4.0, being able to seamlessly connect to ‘anything or anyone,’ interpreting the data and using it in a coherent fashion provides essential business benefits. Featuring these capabilities, eccenca’s solution stack has already made its value proposition indispensable to satisfy the need for data velocity and variety in the agile data infrastructure of the future.