Delphix Explained, the Party Edition

Party Time 

It’s the office Christmas party season and we were invited to one hosted by our landlords and so met many people from different businesses.   These included accountants, employment lawyers, film producers, estate agents and wealth managers;  so quite a diverse bunch but one thing they had in common was at least we had an idea what they did.    The inevitable question we were asked was “What does Delphix do?”

What Delphix Does  

Delphix accelerates business software release cycles, data analysis and reporting to increase company revenues and margins.

Delphix does this by enabling access to and control of unlimited, versioned full data copies allowing Delphix customers to develop and test applications and report and analyze data in parallel.

What is the Problem? 

For business software, companies have substantial application development, testing and operational teams, sometimes running to 1,000s of individuals, dedicated to building, enhancing and maintaining software applications used by their customers and employees.   Companies’ revenue and profitability are increasingly reliant on these applications and their ability to continuously enhance them.

For business intelligence and reporting, companies have teams of data analysts using tools to glean insight from curated data.  All companies require to run increasing numbers of operational, compliance and ad-hoc reports.

All of these scenarios require access to full, up-to-date copies of production and secured production data.

Development and test teams require independent full copies of the application software and its underlying data to develop, test and debug changes.  In general provisioning full copies of the application software and test suites is not a major issue but full copies of databases is non-trivial and commonly companies adopt compromises such as shared copies, reduced size copies and synthetic copies which leads to bottlenecks, quality issues and extended or delayed release cycles.  This leads to a discrete release process rather than a continuous release process.  The root cause is the inability for all members of the development, testing and operational teams to have not just their own copies of these databases but multiple versions as well, as they already do with the application software.

Data Virtualization  

In the world of IT there are many examples of virtualization, including virtual memory, virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual services and virtual storage.   The primary benefits of virtualization are the ability to support increased concurrent workloads, increased control of workloads and higher utilization of physical resources.   Delphix is the first and only company to virtualize databases.

Delphix data virtualization allows all users who need full sized production or secured production database copies to provision these automatically through self-service.  Users can not only provision copies on demand they can have multiple versions of those copies and they can label, share, archive, restore any point in time copy of any version.

Delphix data virtualization super charges development, test, reporting, and analytics by enabling parallel activity on shared virtualized data copies.

Conclusion

Even the Estate Agent gets it.