Now after 12+ years, Corda is here, strong, profitable, and growing. Even more impressive, Corda is still innovating and they present more agile than earlier stage competitors. At the core is a suite of tools that focus on visualizing business data from a variety of sources and delivering results to a broad range of platforms from browsers to mobile devices. In fact, they will soon be announcing a dedicated iPhone application, around the “Corda Mobile” concept. This application will deliver dashboard views specially designed for these devices (and the prototypes look good).
Corda builds on top of existing BI architectures and BI applications (fill in the blank with all the B--- words in the space, and more…). It was commented that part of what they do makes them like a web application framework for BI delivery, focused mainly on a dashboard style visualizations. Those who commented, all agreed.
As a company they have a solid customer base. And in today’s economy, what is even more important is the well hedged portfolio of industries from private (transportation, retail, online business, telecommunications, banks, financial institutions, oil & gas, and manufacturing) as well as government (education, aerospace, federal agencies, state and local entities). The list also includes international clients. As a final note, they also partner with other companies in the space to expand their reach.
My concern with this model is the same as my concern with all players in this space (see the LyzaSoft blog entry). How do we validate the data that we source - and more importantly - how do we reconcile the transformations (integrations, calculations, etc.) that we apply to this data? Starting with my EDW focus, and further encouraged by the renewed focus on risk and compliance in 2009, I am concerned that our integrated data sources are directly traceable, that all transformations are auditable, and that the organization has a clear understanding of the data elements that they are working with (common and clear understanding of technical and business metadata, concise business glossary or MDM references, and generally a enterprise-wide common understanding of key business terms and metrics).
In the end - and Corda (in delivering the dashboards and other end-user visualizations) is clearly the “end” of the BI framework - the result sets we are visualizing are presented to help us make decisions. And these decisions are more and more “enterprise-wide” with cross-functional teams collaborating in the process. While the user-defined flexibility (“easy”) is fantastic, the results need to be reconcilable, auditable, and comply with appropriate data governance initiatives. Especially today.
Of course dealing with this issue is not the sole responsibility of the tool, but as always, the responsibility lies with the broader “people, process and tools” mix. For Corda, they do provide capabilities to capture, pool and present relevant metadata. The charge for the rest of us, and the organization, is to manage the “people and process” components of these initiatives.
With that all being said, Corda looks to be a leading player in this space, impressive in both continuing innovation and ability to deliver. They are officially a company to watch.
