Denodo is the leader in data virtualization, providing agile, high-performance data integration, data abstraction, and real-time data services across the broadest range of enterprise, cloud, big data, and unstructured data sources at half the cost of traditional approaches. Denodo’s customers across every major industry have gained significant business agility and ROI. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Denodo founder and CEO Dr. Ángel Viña to learn more about the company.
Dr. Ángel Viña’s Background
What is Dr. Ángel Viña’s background? Dr. Viña said:
“Before founding Denodo, I received my PhD in Telecommunication Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid in 1987 and was a postdoctoral research visitor at UCLA and Stanford University, and a professor at several universities.”
Formation Of Denodo
How did the idea for Denodo come together? Dr. Viña shared:
“Denodo was founded by myself and a small cohort of people in 1999. The company has its roots in research projects developed at the Technical University of Madrid and, later, at the University of A Coruña in Spain. The research led by me, a then full-time professor, explored the use of real-time data access and integration technologies to accelerate the ‘time to data usage’ in complex distributed data systems. The focus was on bringing speed from data collection to data delivery in a typical distributed IT environment. The dominant technology at the time was either too rigid or too slow. What was initially research soon became the vision for a new generation of data management technology.”
“I worked tirelessly with some of my students and research fellows, many of them still with the company today, to solve a problem which I believed would grow ever more pressing as technology advanced: How can we better integrate and make sense out of, the ever-increasing data diversity in an organization? How can we unify different data systems in real-time? How can we manage in a centralized manner the different data workloads and data flows that bring life to an organization? Ultimately, how can we set data free? The answer was data virtualization. The university research project was brought to life in the commercial sector, and thus, Denodo was born.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Dr. Viña reflected:
“There are so many wonderful memories, but if I had to choose one, it would be the first day in the Palo Alto office on January 1, 2006. I knew, we knew, it was the first day for a project design to be global and transformational in the way organizations address data consumption. It was a good day for me, alone in that office, with the support of my technical team in Spain, and it was a good day for “data”. Since then, we have made a substantial contribution to elevate “data” to the category of a business entity, a first-class business citizen in many organizations.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dr. Viña explained:
“Denodo is a leader in data management. The award-winning Denodo Platform is the leading data integration, management, and delivery platform using a logical approach to enable self-service BI, advanced analytics, hybrid/multi-cloud integration, and enterprise data services. Realizing more than 400% ROI and millions of dollars in benefits, Denodo’s customers across large enterprises and mid-market companies in 30+ industries have received payback in less than six months.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Dr. Viña and the team faced in building the company? Dr. Viña acknowledged:
“Data volumes are in continuous growth, the dispersion of data doesn’t stop increasing, and the patterns of data consumption have become another dimension that complicates the requirements for data management solutions. Almost all recent challenges contain elements from those three areas: performance for managing complex volumes, unification of semantics in distributed diverse data ecosystems, and hyper-personalized consumption for real data democratization under solid governance.”
Evolution Of Denodo’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Dr. Viña noted:
“The core ideas behind Denodo’s software have remained the same: organizations are distributed, and so is their data, and a logical layer that provides a simpler way to access, secure, and govern that data allows those organizations to turn that distribution into an advantage. However, the technological landscape has evolved significantly since the company’s inception, and the software has evolved with it. The introduction of Big Data, the transition to the cloud, or the current rise of generative AI are some examples of areas that pose significant changes to the software. Another very significant change came from the ideas of data democratization and self-service, which introduced new personas with new requirements to the data landscape. Business users now make up a very significant portion of Denodo’s end users, whereas during its first years, the focus was on data engineering and BI teams.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dr. Viña cited:
“We are especially proud of being a global company reaching all corners of the world with exceptional expertise in data management. The Denodo post-sales service receives outstanding reviews from our customers. This is an indicator of the high quality of our technology, but ultimately solidifies that we are a team that always goes above and beyond to operate in the market as an extension of the IT of our customers’ organizations. On behalf of Denodo, we are so proud to be solely recognized by 2024 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: for data integration for the fourth consecutive year.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Dr. Viña about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Yes, we are pleased to work with Estes Express Lines, a transportation and logistics company and one of the largest trucking fleets in the USA. Estes Express Lines needed a single view of freight in order to make sure deliveries happened on time and at a low cost along with a single view for their customers, but their data was everywhere. They struggled to aggregate the customer, billing, shipping and location data while also migrating the cloud. With the help of the award-winning Denodo platform, they built a single logical data fabric, so their customers, as well as internal analysts and app developers, had a single view of everything without having to physically move all this data. Estes Express was able to deliver a unified digital customer experience so customers could easily track all their shipments everywhere. Estes analysts optimized their operations and cut their IT costs by 10%. In addition, the new data sets could be delivered within days instead of the 4 to 6 weeks previously required. This allowed for the business to be much more agile, responding to changing conditions and improving services much more quickly than before.”
“We also have done tremendous work in the public sector. We worked with The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, a university in Australia. With the help of the Denodo platform, the university provided a single view of students and various student services from over 70 different source systems. Originally done for COVID-19 contact tracing, this also helped improve the student experience with university resources, student safety, and knowledge sharing. This resulted in higher student retention, as well as much lower data-related IT costs.”
Funding/Revenue
When asking Dr. Viña about the company’s funding and revenue details, he revealed:
“As a private company, we don’t disclose financial details, but the recent Series B funding with TPG was a $390 million investment. Denodo broke all the records in the software space in 2023 with this transaction, in adverse conditions for investments in technology. Our Series B was another validation of our trajectory and the importance of having leading edge data management technology to help companies be more competitive and stay ahead of the curve.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dr. Viña assessed:
“IDC estimates the TAM to be $37 billion, assigning $14B to data integration, $4B to data intelligence software, and the remaining $19B to data analytics. It is a huge market that is growing very fast, at 12% CAGR.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dr. Viña affirmed:
“From a technology perspective, performance and security have always been key differences. Denodo stands alone in the market with its combination of data integration, data security and data cataloging in the same platform, providing a unified data experience.”
“Most other data platform vendors have a philosophy of integrating, aggregating, and governing data in a central cloud data lake or warehouse or a single cloud platform. As a result, organizations spend a lot of time moving and preparing data in one physical location and can lose sight of the goal: delivering to the business exactly the data they need when they need it. Organizations still struggle with this, even after spending millions on cloud data platforms. At Denodo, we turned this philosophy on its head. We give you access to the exact data you need, in the exact form you need it, as fast as you need it, without having to move, copy or consolidate the data. The data can stay where it is. By short-circuiting all this data movement, data is accessible and prepped in just a third of the time, according to our customer surveys, and without compromising quality or security as Trust is ‘designed in.’ Our customers get a positive ROI in under six months on average. In the modern world, the pace of change is only increasing and getting trusted data in end-users’ hands is critical. Whether it’s self-service analytics, an AI-driven app, automating a business process, or regulatory reporting, only Denodo gets the data you need when you need it without the overhead.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the future company goals? Dr. Viña pointed out:
“We have been a stable company since inception, growing organically with a clear vision: Denodo imagines a world in which business users can immediately and easily access the data they need without worrying about where it is housed, how it is formatted, or how quickly it changes.”
“Our roadmap and partnership with customers continue intact today by delivering our best on that vision too and committed to transforming the way organizations innovate and operate their businesses by unifying their data assets in real-time and making data ubiquitous and secure to all users and business applications.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Dr. Viña concluded:
“This interview won’t be complete without mentioning Gen AI, right? Let me share with your audience the excitement in the Denodo community with the support for Gen AI applications in the new Denodo 9 platform. We are partnering with major Gen AI tech firms for the acceleration of AI initiatives in the enterprise. Our recent announcements with Google Cloud Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, Nvidia and Open AI, to optimize the augmentation of LLMs with corporate data through RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) opens an infinite range of possibilities to apply Gen AI to enterprise business scenarios. We are already working with several Denodo customers on a first wave of business applications that will revolutionize the experience of consuming data in organizations.”
