Frédéric Robert, Consulting Director in charge of the Data Advisory Business Line, shares his experience with Tale of Data.
The company: APGAR
APGAR is an independent consulting and services company founded in 2013. The group, a pure player in the field of data management, analytics and AI, supports companies of all sizes and in all business sectors that place their data at the heart of their strategy.
Nearly 200 employees work for the company in France and abroad at 12 locations (France, Lebanon, Portugal, Spain, UK
USA, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia)Apgar offers a wide range of services, from consulting to implementation and training, from the provision of pre-configured solutions to the support of platforms in production at its customers' sites, with the conviction that it is possible to reconcile the exploitation of data with ethics and social responsibility.
APGAR has been identified three times by Gartner as one of the world's top 18 data management players in its "MDM Market Guide 2024".
The challenges
Always on the lookout for solutions, APGAR places innovation at the heart of its strategy to position its service and consulting offerings with differentiating value to meet its customers' needs. A number of facts stand out:
1/ For many years, data quality was forgotten, with companies thinking that with the advent of Big Data, the Cloud and AI, they would escape this task.
2/ The major software publishers have worked hard to integrate this functionality into the other components of their Data Platforms, which have become inoperative patchworks.
3/ As the world of data becomes increasingly self-service, companies are looking to give their business teams real access to their data. The ability to manipulate and control this data enables them to create their own reports and share quality data.
It's clear that today - especially with the growing awareness and desire for AI and Machine Learning - data quality management is once again of paramount importance, even if, in most cases, it remains largely underestimated.
"It's not AI that will miraculously correct the data. It's by carrying out this preparatory work, this quality control with the business, that companies realize that they need it to get their use cases out the door". says Frédéric RobertConsulting Director in charge of the Data Advisory Business Line.
"I was very interested in Tale of Data 4 years ago, because we were looking for an offer in data preparation, quality and management. Its positioning around data is a little different, very Franco-French, and we like working with this human-scale ecosystem. We wanted to equip our customers with pragmatic, practical solutions that were a long way from the big players on the market.
Why Tale of Data?
The technical aspect depends on whether you're a pure player or not. If you are, the editor builds his solution around the desired objective, i.e. data preparation.
"It's not like all the other players who have an accumulation of technological bricks that they've bought, some of which are outdated. In the case of Tale of Data, there's a vision, the tool is new, built from the latest technological bricks" explains Mr. Robert.
"We are confronted with a lack of awareness when it comes to data recovery or re-quality. When the time comes to validate, test and load the data to be transferred, we realize that companies haven't budgeted enough time or resources, and have decided to use Excel alone at the last minute. Clearly, a solution like Tale of Data helps us to be very pragmatic, and to provide a much more malleable, high-performance tool than an Excel file. I wouldn't say they've come in as 'saviors', but rather as a bit of a last-minute solution to make life easier for our customers and consultants," he continues.
In fact, the solution is pragmatic, simple to use and easy to learn. The screens are designed to provide the services expected of the solution. There's also an awareness of the solution's "replayability".
"With Tale of Data, we know how to version a data pipe, we can say why we made a change, we can reuse it on another perimeter, in another country for example, or with other volumes, making the right adaptations. There's this capacity for proof. It's part of industrialization, and that's something that's important in the world of the data platform.
APGAR also notes that organizations that used to have competence centers with central teams to manage all their data are moving away from this model. They are increasingly working in " federated " with data relays in the business departments, who are familiar with their data and processes.
"Businesses just need to be acculturated to the data tools, and it's easier to train them than to do everything centrally," explains explains Mr. Robert.
One of Tale of Data's strengths lies in the quality of the end-to-end solution, the fact that it means teams don't have to redo things, and that knowledge is better shared to achieve better results.
"With Tale of Data, as with a cake recipe, the preparation, monitoring and quality/transformation of end-to-end data are carried out in a pragmatic, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn way. As such, we can draw inspiration from it, or even reuse part of the recipe to do something else (sustainability), which represents an economic factor and a time-saver".
In the future
With the emergence of AI, Machine Learning and generative AI, we are witnessing a market expectation, as employees have had access to these tools on a personal basis.
"It's becoming very important for all data platform solutions to be augmented. With this notion, there's the co-pilot aspect. We support the user in auto-completion, making it easier to copy data without making mistakes, and providing the right alert messages. Tale of Data also automates data management processes. There are a lot of expectations regarding the monitoring and predictive aspects of data management solutions", says Tale of Data. says Mr Robert.
To delve deeper into these perspectives and understand how Tale of Data integrates generative AI to revolutionize data quality, don't miss our editorial: "Generative AI to optimize data quality: Tale of Data's innovative approach".
In the future, the partnership with Tale of Data is clearly taking shape
"We believe in the solution, in the business model, in the fact that it brings value to the market, that it is differentiating, and that it fits in well with our values". concludes Mr Robert.