Silicon Valley-based Orion Governance has won the award for Best Graph Database Solution for Data Management in A-Team Group’s inaugural Data Management Insight Awards – USA 2022. These awards celebrate leading providers of data management solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets participants across North America.
Orion’s data management solution, Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) , was selected as a winner by A-Team Group’s independent, highly experienced advisory board in collaboration with A-Team Group’s editorial team.
Ramesh Shurma, founder and CEO at Orion, explains why and how the company’s award-winning solution was created, the technologies it involves, and the benefits it can deliver. He also discusses the development roadmap.
A-Team: Ramesh, please tell us a little about Orion and the types of capital markets clients you work with.
Ramesh: Orion was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Our mission is to disrupt the information management space and solve the data challenges experienced by enterprises across a variety of industries including large investment banking and financial services firms, while ensuring low cost of ownership.
A-Team: What challenges do global financial firms face?
Ramesh: Many have data silos across the enterprise, technology stacks based on legacy mainframes, and huge volumes of data. No-one fully understands information flows, it is difficult to access required data at any speed, and consultants are often called in to help. These firms need to modernise the technology stack to achieve a near-real time picture of data across the organisation. This provides unique insights to end users and empowers them to drive value out of data.
A-Team: How does Orion work with clients to provide solutions to these challenges?
Ramesh: We have a FastStart programme that takes four weeks and includes installation, training and deploying EIIG to extract and visualise the end-to-end data workflow and assets.
The entry point is often solving a particular data problem for a client. Our goal is to resolve the problem while accelerating time to value and return on investment. Once the success of the solution is shown, take-up spreads like wildfire.
A-Team: What is the role of the company’s award-winning graph database in optimising data management and modernisation?
Ramesh: Orion EIIG helps eliminate 80% of work on most application modernisation and data migration efforts by combining data cataloging, impact analysis, process dependency tracking, data lineage, data transparency, and trust propagation.
The technology is agnostic, scalable, and can be deployed on-premise, as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), in a private cloud or a public cloud – we work with technology partners including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Snowflake.
EIIG maps metadata from more than 60 technology sources in near real-time with Zero Impact to Production (ZIP). By automatically connecting all the assets across an enterprise, metadata silos are broken down, data quality and accuracy go up, and the provision of active metadata allows the business to make better decisions based on high-quality data in near real-time.
A-Team: What sort of use cases does Orion support?
Ramesh: Orion EIIG use cases in financial services include regulatory compliance, DevOps, and reducing costs and errors.
For example, the focus of regulation BCBS 239 is quality of governance, data and reporting processes. EIIG delivers compliance by bringing a centralised and automated, AI and machine learning (ML) supported, real-time view of all data assets in the data supply chain with ZIP. Actions and decisions can then be made using this view.
Orion EIIG also provides near real-time impact analysis, enabling clients to understand system dependencies and data stresses, and helping them navigate modernisation. Similarly, the solution can support cloud and application transformation journeys.
A-Team: How does EIIG work and what technologies does it incorporate?
Ramesh: As we noted earlier, EIIG ingests metadata from numerous sources, which could be anything from structured and unstructured data to business glossaries, ETL, BI tools, and programming languages, using metadata ingesters. An Orion developed ML and AI engine matches and unifies the data, and connects business terminology to create a data catalog of all assets.
This knowledge graph provides the foundational data fabric for metadata discovery by allowing a search capability against a data catalog that is automatically generated. Rest APIs and other Orion interfaces can access the data catalog to provide a discovery and analysis environment.
A-Team: What are the benefits of implementing Orion’s graph database solution?
Ramesh: The benefits of EIIG are many and diverse. I would focus on the ability to make informed decisions, optimise operational costs and reduce risk, as well as the broader benefits of hyper awareness of what is going on across the enterprise.
As a single model with a multiple view approach, EIIG is open to users in a variety of ways, perhaps on a read only data basis or via controlled access managed by administrators and data stewards.
Deployments typically take about four weeks, providing super-fast time to value. These benefits are being realised at some large financial institutions and clearing houses, and at one of the world’s large stock exchanges, for which we have processed massive footprints.
A-Team: Please talk us through a case study of EIIG
Ramesh: We worked alongside a global bank with compliance issues. The bank has one of the top five mainframe footprints in the world and code written over the past 50 years. Its challenges involved tracing information from a mainframe into risk models, and proving to regulators what information had been transferred and why the risk models failed.
The bank came to Orion to remediate the situation. It was trying to solve the problem using excel spreadsheets, but the regulator said, ‘no more’. We helped the bank build a self-defined data fabric that ingested metadata from the source code and allowed it to see how data flowed and was transformed before being fed into the risk models.
A-Team: How will you develop the solution over the next year?
Ramesh: We are a nimble organisation focused on one niche solution, so we need to be excellent at what we do. We have seen validation of our strategy, even though on a road less travelled, and will continue to increase automation and help enterprises become highly efficient and avoid making the same mistakes as in the past.
A-Team: Finally, Ramesh, what does winning this award mean to Orion?
Ramesh: We are honoured to be recognised in these A-Team Group awards after a lot of hard work over the past five years. Our team is based across North and South America, Europe, India and Singapore, and it has taken the whole team, working at its best, to build a product we are proud of.
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