Dear Customers, Partners, and Colleagues:

As we settle into the new year, we at CData have been even more energized to improve the way businesses like yours work with their data. Modern businesses increasingly rely on data from heterogenous systems for diverse needs, ranging from new use cases in machine learning to perennial tasks in data visualization and business intelligence. Moreover, as data becomes more prominent in every aspect of business, data consumerism is shifting from predominantly IT and engineering to the lines of business.

Our goal at CData has always been to provide real-time data connectivity that can reach all of your data in a secure and governable way that serves all of your users using their tool of choice. I wanted to take a moment in this letter to highlight some of our achievements and learnings in 2022 and give you all a look into how CData is positioned for further success in the new year.

A Year of Growth

2022 was a year of milestones for CData. After raising $140 million in Series B funding in late 2021, we enjoyed a strong period of growth and innovation. We were recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.S. by Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and won several notable awards including the BIG Innovation Award and the Stratus Award for Cloud Computing. We grew our workforce by 50% and continue to seek talent to help us innovate faster. I am conscious of the pain the recent layoffs at major technology companies have caused, and want to assure you that we remain profitable and continue to be conscientious in how we grow our team.

Partners

We have cultivated strong OEM partnerships with leading ISVs and household names who embed our connectivity solutions into their platforms. Last year, we welcomed 18 new OEM partners, bringing our total of such partnerships to 158. We’re also ramping up our efforts to support our robust network of over 150 technology partners, such as Snowflake, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

Our partners not only help us reach many more customers than we could directly, but they also provide us with valuable insights into market trends and ensure our real-time connectivity solutions can solve a wide variety of data management challenges.

Security

We made great strides in 2022 to improve the security and quality of our development processes. We achieved SOC 2 Type 1 certification, and are working on further improvements and certifications in the coming months. We recognize that the security of software that handles enterprise data is table stakes for any deployment and we are committed to providing our users with the most secure, governable data connectivity solutions possible.

Real-Time Connectivity

Most notably last year, we launched CData Connect Cloud, the first-ever Data Connectivity as-a-Service platform. This no-code real-time connectivity solution was born from our vision to provide easy, flexible, fast data access for everyone across the organization regardless of their technical skills. CData Connect Cloud leverages our full library of CData Drivers in a cloud-native platform that makes it simple to access your data from anywhere without having to install anything.  

Of course, we also added multiple new data sources to our library of CData Drivers, bringing our current total to 260. As you have come to expect, CData is not just concerned with the breadth of connectors we provide, but we remain invested in providing users with the fastest, most performant connectors in the market. Our engineering team keeps on top of API changes supporting our connectors and constantly enhances our existing library of connectors with new capabilities.

Data Integration

Beyond connectivity, we continue to invest in our data integration solutions, CData Sync and DBAmp, and B2B integration solution, CData Arc. Each of these applications is built on top of the same powerful connectivity technology available in our connectors.

We have done a lot of work in improving the UI/UX of Sync, making it easier to use and ensuring that our ETL/ELT solution has the best performance when moving and storing data. As hybrid cloud data ecosystems become more prevalent, we’re making it easier for our customers to migrate massive amounts of data from on-prem databases to cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Google Big Query, and RedShift, and move data from cloud sources to on-prem data warehouses.

CData DBAmp is an especially powerful tool in the hands of SQL developers. We’re receiving great feedback from SQL developers about its ability to seamlessly integrate with SQL Server. Now, we’re exploring ways to extend that powerful integration beyond Salesforce. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please let me know.

Customer Success

I would like to call out one of the areas where we struggled in the first half of 2022. We saw a tremendous increase in our prospect base; consequently, our support and pre-sales team struggled to keep up with demand. We take great pride in our ability to help customers solve their unique connectivity challenges, often taking the time to consult with them beyond just what our products can do. We could not do that as well as we would have liked earlier last year. Since then, however, we have built up our support team and started tracking NPS scores on support transactions and we’re in a great place going forward to help solve any challenges you might face.

I’m also pleased to announce that we are currently working to stand up a brand new CData Community site, where customers and partners can ask questions of your peers and fellow data experts, find answers to technical questions, get inspiration for new use cases, and much more. We’re thrilled to provide a channel for our users to engage with each other and the CData team, and we hope you find it valuable going forward. We plan to launch the Community very soon so be on the lookout for an announcement!

Market Recognition

CData is garnering more recognition than ever from industry experts, media, and analysts. Last year, we were mentioned in research reports from Gartner, Forrester, 451, Aragon, and KuppingerCole. CData takes pride in our ability to break through as a disruptor in the data integration market, and it is only because many of you have spoken with these firms about our real-time data connectivity platform that we are able to earn this recognition. We thank you for doing so.

Thank you for your continued support of the CData team. We wish you a wonderful new year and look forward to connecting soon.