Dear Customers, Partners, and Colleagues:
As we roll into the second quarter of the year, it’s remarkable to see the strides we’ve made as a company in 2024. Since my last corporate update, the CData team has been hard at work executing major initiatives to propel our business and technologies forward. Today, I'm excited to share a glimpse into our accomplishments from the past year and offer insight into how CData is poised for even greater success in 2024.
Continued Growth in 2023 and Beyond
2023 was a banner year for CData as we continued to scale in both revenue and workforce. Our newest product, CData Connect Cloud, has seen immense success, leading to 4X growth of our SaaS business in 2023. Enterprise customers have especially benefited from the ability to virtualize data to improve reporting processes with centralized, scalable, and secure access to live data in the cloud.
Last year we expanded our workforce by 15% to help support growing business needs. Additions to our Engineering and Support teams underscore our dedication to building innovative, performant data access technologies and bolstering customer success initiatives. We remain dedicated to maintaining and exceeding our current 67% NPS score and 8.8/10 CSAT rating. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out our new CData Community site, where customers can connect with CData experts and fellow users to find success with our products.
For the second consecutive year, CData was named one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.S. by Deloitte Technology Fast 500, we earned our second BIG Innovation Award, and held the title of Data Integration Innovation of the Year in the Data Breakthrough Awards.
Amid this tremendous growth, CData remains, as always, extremely profitable in how we operate the business.
Artificial Intelligence Initiatives
We are living through a historic change in the world of data due to the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative AI. Data has always been valuable for superior decision-making, but advances in generative AI will prove data to be a significant competitive advantage that will alter how people work.
Generative AI is already transforming what data management software products can do by making them more approachable to a wider swath of people and accelerating the need for data connectivity to feed proprietary data as contextual information into AI models.
Our approach to offering connectivity based on SQL and relational standards is well suited for generative AI. Generative AI is exceptional at code generation, and, as a declarative language, SQL is most conducive to this approach. The ability to ask questions in natural language to your data will only become more useful as the industry figures out how to securely provide private context to public models.
We are not the only ones investing in our products based on this seismic shift. We’re seeing an increased demand from our OEM partners utilizing CData Connectors to support their AI initiatives.
Evolving Integration Patterns
Our customers leverage CData across a wide range of use cases, including data integration, AI workloads, business intelligence and reporting, data catalogs, big data processing, etc. This gives us unique insight into the data access challenges organizations are facing and how they solve them.
As such, we are convinced that there is not a single pattern that solves all customer needs. ETL/ELT-based integration is widely adopted, but we are seeing an increasing need for modern data virtualization (accessing and working with data across your SaaS applications without moving it) and lake house query acceleration.
Last year we took huge strides in increasing our support for both of these integration patterns. CData Sync, our offering for ETL/ELT, was recognized as a strong performer in The Forrester Wave
: Cloud Data Pipelines. CData Sync benefits from world-class connectivity embedded inside the platform, meaning our customers can access data from hundreds of applications and sources with a data model that is conducive to reporting. We’ve also added capabilities like CDC, reverse ETL, and enterprise pipeline management features. We’re particularly proud of our unique approach to pricing, which offers value and predictability to enterprises.
But while ETL/ELT pipelines can solve for many use cases, they are not well suited for ad-hoc analysis, real-time reporting, or bi-directional data transfer. We’re seeing customers who want to expand their access to data across a broader set of teams, and across a variety of tools – ranging from automation systems like Power Automate to office and reporting applications like Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau, and Power BI. Doing so in a secure and governed manner is key to boost work productivity and unlock the potential of data.
CData Connect Cloud has solved these challenges for many organizations. The enterprise-class SaaS platform bundles all our connectors in the cloud, providing broad connectivity across hundreds of client tools. Organizations can finally allow team members (whether they be developers, business analysts, or line of business users) to access live data with their tool of choice in a governed and secure fashion.
In a couple weeks, we will be hosting a virtual event to share more about how CData is taking a new approach to data virtualization, showcasing how customers are leveraging this platform for their needs. Register today for the March 14 event.
Another area of interest for us is traditional data virtualization and lake house query acceleration. We often see the need for data engineers to merge data from multiple sources, looking for query federation and optimization while utilizing cached or materialized views where necessary. We are working on a few exciting initiatives in this space that we will announce very soon. Stay tuned!
Chances to Connect with CData
The CData team will be on the road often this year, and we’d love to connect with you. In Q2 alone, we’ll be attending Data Universe, Tableau Conference, Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Workday DevCon, Snowflake Summit, and more. See our upcoming events schedule here.
Thank you for your ongoing support of our organization. We wish you a wonderful 2024 and look forward to catching up soon!
