Naveego: Providing Cloud Native Data Integration Platform for Effective Decision-Making

Naveego© is a leading provider of cloud native data integration platforms with built-in data quality, data accuracy and governance. The Naveego® Complete Data Accuracy Platform uses API connectors to connect to new data sources in minutes and match and merge data into a golden record in hours to produce an analytics-ready stream of trusted and accurate data for dashboards, reporting and analytics applications. The self-service no-code platform allows non-technical business users and data stewards to actively manage their data. It seamlessly connects to each source whether in the cloud or on-premise and scales effortlessly to automate the building of trusted data pipelines.  

The Determined Leaders 

Naveego’s founder Derek Smith continues to lead the technical vision for Naveego as CTO. Katie Horvath, the company’s President & CEO, is believed to be the only woman CEO in Big Data in at least North America. Naveego is one of the only Big Data companies headquartered in Michigan. Katie serves on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation AI Advisory Board and often is an invited speaker as an industry thought leader, such as recently participating in the keynote for Oracle Cloud Day. 

Data Management with Cloud Solution 

Derek firsthand as a services provider saw the pain of fragmented data across an organization. He believes that the modern way with which most companies operate includes the adoption of best-of-breed software applications by different functional business units (Sales teams have a preferred CRM, marketing teams have preferred digital marketing platforms, accounting teams have preferred billing solutions, and so on…). This creates separate data silos, which in turn leads to a lack of consistency of data across an organization. If one asks the same question of different departments using different data sources, one will likely to get different answers, even for simple questions like “what is a customer’s address” or “what is a customer’s purchase history.” Poor data quality typically costs a company millions of dollars each year in operational time trying to figure out which data is correct, as well as lost opportunities for revenue growth and cost reduction.   

Legacy master data management solutions historically used to bring together disparate data sources typically were only accessible to enterprises with large budgets for infrastructure changes and were built for on-premises data management by highly skilled FTEs needed to use and maintain these solutions. Derek knew that there was a better way to manage data, including not just the IT department, but the non-technical data stewards in the business who were better positioned to recognize errors in the content of the data, but who had no knowledge of database structure or writing computer code. Accordingly, Derek set out to create a nimble data management solution accessible to mid-market through enterprise organizations and founded Naveego in 2014 with a cloud-native master data management solution for the oil & gas industry.   

In 2018, Katie joined Naveego as CEO and led the company through a redesign of the product to create Naveego’s Complete Data Accuracy platform to move into Big Data and expand and diversify into new markets including financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics. While legacy MDM projects often took months and years for results, Naveego connected a new data source in minutes and produced golden records of accurate mastered data in hours. In 2020, the company launched a no-code self-service data integration platform, built upon its data accuracy technologies, to bring data silos together and produce golden records of immediately useable and governed analytics-ready data.   

Managing Customer Data with Cloud Services 

Naveego set itself apart with one of the industry’s first and distinctive services which includes: 

• One of only two cloud-native data management solutions on the market. (This differs from legacy on-premises solutions and solutions managing cloud-based data sources.) 
• Naveego’s philosophy is that the company manages customer data where it sits. This means that Naveego is technology agnostic, support multiple clouds and on-premises environments and do not require infrastructure change or cloud vendor lock-in to use the company’s technology.  
• Naveego® is unique because it has built self-service for the non-technical business user with no coding or IT support required. 
• As a data integration platform, Naveego is different because it has built-in data accuracy (MDM, DQ technologies) and data governance (lineage and audit trail of changes made to data). The company not only brings the data together – but also makes it accurate, trusted and useable. 
• Its key partnerships include Oracle Cloud (Naveego is an Oracle Cloud Marketplace solution for integrating and providing immediately useable data to Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse); Mondelio (partner in Australia through which Naveego entered the APAC market in 2018); Stonebridge Consulting (partnered for oil & gas industry product EnerHub); Cloudera; Sisense; Snowflake (Naveego makes data lakes usable by managing the data therein); Aunalytics (Naveego® to be used for integration layer of DaybreakTM and Aunsight® products). 

Transforming Disparate Data Sources into Accurate Analytics 

Naveego states that using the industry phrase “master data management” often invoked past horror stories of legacy MDM technologies not working and being cost-prohibitive. The company found it challenging to convey how it had flipped data management up-side-down with its cloud-first approach because people stopped listening, the moment they heard the word “MDM” due to bad past experiences with other products. Similarly, in describing Naveego’s product, “data quality” was limiting because it traditionally means correcting issues with the form and format of data, and not the content. So, the company rebranded itself and created its lane in “data accuracy,” which encompasses consistency, data quality, cataloguing, correcting errors in data content, matching and merging into golden records, and data governance. Naveego transforms disparate data sources into golden records of accurate analytics-ready business information and corrects data errors at their root with bidirectional sync to source systems. 

Data Integration for Efficient Analytics Innovation 

 Cloud technologies enable the post-COVID-19 to work from home environment. The company says that without the cloud, people would not be able to access the company data to a remote workforce. COVID-19 has accelerated adoption of cloud technologies and innovation therein.   

Automation, such as Naveego’s data integration and wrangling technology, enables highly paid and skilled data scientists and analysts to focus on analytics instead of data clean up. It provides efficiencies to free up time and resources for analytics innovation.   

Derek said, “AI/ML produce insights rapidly but must begin with a foundation of accurate data for training sets and analysis, or else the results are meaningless. Having data feeding analytics in real-time is game-changing for the speed of analytics – no longer are the analytics-based upon snapshots of data from a moment in time that is already outdated when the analytical results are in.” 

Remarkable Awards and Recognition 

Naveego has been recognized by leading research and media publication for driving excellence in big data and analytics industry. Some of the notable ones include: 

• 2018 CRN Top 10 New Data Management Tools 
• 2018 Solutions Review Top 5 Emerging Data Management Tools that Most Matter 
• 2018 Gartner Emerging Technology mention at the annual conference 
• 2019 CRN Big Data 100 Data Management and Integration 
• 2019 CIO Review Top 10 Data Management Solutions  
• Feature by Forbes in July 2020 
• Recent sales win with a large multinational insurance company over close competitor Reltio, credited to it solution which does not require customers to build and maintain, “glue code” to use the platform. Moreover, Naveego’s no code technology is ready to use out of the box without requiring customization. 

The Future Ahead 

 Derek believes that data lakes are rapidly being adopted as a solution for siloed data. But, data accuracy problems are not being solved – they are just being moved from separate data sources into the lake. He adds that many companies are trying to use data lakes as data warehouses, but data lakes lack data management for creating immediately usable data.  

Naveego works within data lakes to create consistent and usable data, and this use case will only continue to grow. Further, mid-market companies that do not have the budget or bandwidth for a data science department want to use data analytics for growing revenue and cutting costs. This will continue to increase demand for self-service solutions like Naveego® that empower non-technical business users to master analytics, automate data integration and provide trust in company data for mission-critical decision-making.