IT and Business Services (ITBusiness), an end-to-end data management solutions specialist in the KID Group of companies, has brought data integration capabilities to South Africa through a partnership with StreamSets, a Software AG company.

ITBusiness is the first StreamSets partner in Africa, bringing the company’s unique capabilities to the local market.

The partnership comes hot on the heels of the announcement that ITBusiness has become the premier certified Yellowbrick Data Warehouse partner in Africa, bringing elastic data warehouse capabilities to local customers. The partnerships are in line with ITBusiness’s strategy to bring best-of-breed, next-generation data solutions to the local market.

Chris Pallikarides, MD of ITBusiness, says StreamSets’ award-winning platform addresses a growing need for real-time data at scale.

“Essentially, StreamSets makes real-time data as real time as possible. Real time has always been relative – sometimes it can mean a matter of seconds. But where important decisions are being made on the fly – like in a stock exchange – even one second counts. It allows you to move data in real time from any source to any target, in any environment – on-premises or in the cloud.”

StreamSets’ change data capture (CDC) identifies and tracks data changes in a source system, automatically updating only the data that has changed, syncing database environments and enabling faster, more accurate reporting.

StreamSets also caters for schema — or data — drift. Pallikarides says many other tools are uncompromising, with custom coding or rigid integrations built using schema-centric ETL tools. StreamSets offers the advantage of allowing new sources to be added in minutes and handling unexpected data drift that impacts schema automatically, to maintain dataflow reliability and data quality.

Minimises complexity

“We are very excited about this partnership, which allows us to solve a lot of complex problems for our clients to move data from anywhere to anywhere, reliably. Our technical teams are excited, too, since it minimises complexity and allows them to reduce time to value for clients,” he says.

Pallikarides believes the StreamSets and YellowBrick solutions will help local organisations overcome the challenges associated with growing volumes of data and a need for faster, more accurate insights. “There’s a lot of data out there. Each person creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day according to current estimates, and there are eight billion people in the world. That’s a lot of data to be moved and analysed,” he says. The situation is even more challenging for sectors working with large datasets, he notes. “For sectors with high volumes of transactions, like finance, insurance and healthcare, where a lot of data is generated and needs to be moved, it will be beneficial.”

StreamSets operationalises data engineering and integration to ensure resilience and agility despite constant change, to take a modern approach to data integration and data pipeline operations at scale.

Pallikarides says: “If organisations are struggling to move data, and move it quickly, no matter the source or target, StreamSets offers the solution. In addition, it simplifies the environment and allows them to do it more cost effectively than they have been to date.”

About ITBusiness
IT and Business Services (ITBusiness), part of the KID Group of companies, is a solution development and professional consulting company that provides end-to-end data management solutions with measurable business impact.

Boasting a 20-year track record and a level-2 B-BBEE accreditation, ITBusiness is geared to support any industry’s data requirements. Organisations including MultiChoice, Investec, Access Bank, Hollywoodbets and many more trust and leverage ITBusiness industry expertise and best-of-breed technologies to unlock key insights in their data.