Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Ibrahim Surani, CEO at Astera Software:
Q: Can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today?
A: We believe that at the core of every business, data serves as the driving force that paves the way for breakthrough innovations and organizational growth. It helps create the building blocks for a variety of business initiatives, whether it is introducing a new product or service in the market, changing marketing strategy, optimizing production processes, or improving sales cycles.
Back in 2009, we recognized that for companies to utilize the power of data fully, they need to empower their business users to work directly with data. With this aspiration, we founded Astera Software to develop solutions that put the power of data into the hands of business users, while enabling the technical IT squads to be the driver of change in the organization.
Fast-forward today, Astera Software is a rapidly growing data solutions provider that enables Fortune 500 companies to bring data-driven innovation.
Q: What types of solutions do you provide to your clients?
A: We offer end-to-end data integration and extraction solutions through our highly intuitive products, Astera Centerprise and Astera ReportMiner.
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Speaking about Astera Centerprise, it is our flagship product that allows you to take data stored in multiple systems, manipulate and validate it as per your needs, and consolidate it without having to write a single line of code. It also supports Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to facilitate B2B information exchange among customers, partners, vendors, and other stakeholders.
As for Astera ReportMiner, it enables you to liberate trapped insights from unstructured reports and documents. Business users can easily create reusable extraction templates and workflows that they can use to automate the extraction process. The supported file formats include PDF forms, PDFs, RTF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, PRN, COBOL, XLS, and XLSX. The software can handle a variety of complex scenarios, allowing you to work with hundreds of sources and deliver information to business users in the organization-wide accepted formats.
Our technology brings a lot of useful features and components to the table, such as workflow automation, parallel processing ETL engine, point-and-click data mapping environment, a vast selection of connectors, REST API connectivity, and a set of built-in transformations, among others. In addition, both products feature a highly intuitive, visual user-interface, which makes creating, executing, and automating data integration and extraction jobs a breeze.
Q: Who are your clients?
A: Astera Software caters to the data integration and extraction needs of SMEs and large enterprises. Some of our major customers are Fortune 500 companies, like Wells Fargo, Novartis, HP Inc., and Xerox, to name a few. Since our solutions are industry-agnostic, we have customers from finance, healthcare, government, education, non-profit, manufacturing, and many other industries.
Q: What are some of the key challenges you’re helping them solve?
A: Our solutions are designed to cater to a wide range of data-related problems. Some of the most prominent use cases in which we excel are:
360° Customer View: It’s no surprise that every business wants to deliver deeper, rich experiences to their new and existing customers and set benchmarks for those in the pipeline. And for that, they need a complete picture of the customer journey to tailor its solutions to meet the evolving demands. This holds more importance today as customers engage via multiple channels, providing valuable information at each touchpoint. Astera’s data integration solutions help collect and consolidate information about customers’ history, preferences, patterns, account details, behaviors, and more. This creates a single source of truth for employees, enabling data-driven decision making.
Partner Onboarding and Data Management: Companies typically work with a network of vendors and partners to leverage their solutions for optimizing organizational processes. Since each organization works with different formats and volumes, it requires developers to create custom workflows for handling incoming data from various vendors and partners. Our data solutions take manual scripting and workflow creation out of the equation, and automate the process from extraction to consolidation, saving up to 90% time and effort of IT teams.
Syncing Enterprise-Wide Data: Having up-to-date information about customers, marketing spends, production rates, and sales performance can lead to making accurate, timely decisions to maximize the impact of your efforts. Astera’s solutions enable businesses to keep critical data in multiple systems updated across the organization. This allows users in different departments and business units, locally and internationally, to have access to the most recent data in real-time.
Self-Service Data Access: Astera’s solutions are essentially designed with business users in mind. By providing a simple, intuitive drag and drop environment and easy-to-use functionality, we enable business users to access siloed information stored in dispersed databases without requiring the assistance of IT. By equipping them with the right tool for self-service data access, business users avoid bottlenecks and delays and get insights at the speed of business.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Whenever a business absorbs another company, they need to collect, massage, and consolidate massive amounts of data to bring harmony across hundreds of database and information systems. Secure, fast, and effective data integration is critical during these business maneuvers. With Astera Centerprise, businesses can easily connect, update, and sync disparate datasets from both entities and create a single source of truth for business continuity.
Q: What are your core values? How do you stand out from your competition?
A: Astera Software strongly focuses on three core values: accessibility, performance, and customer-focused solutions. These driving principles are reflected in everything from our corporate culture to our solutions, and in the way we deliver services and support.
As for the Astera difference, our company has been built on the principle that the ability to control and tap into the power of data shouldn’t be just limited to IT teams and developers. We have end-to-end products that allow non-technical users to analyze data as it comes in through their systems and use it to derive meaningful insights as needed in a variety of business scenarios. Add in metrics like enterprise-ready performance, scalable architecture, and an intuitive UI to the mix, and you have a well-rounded platform that can offer superior functionality to other data integration solutions in the market.
And this is not just paying lip service to our software here. One thing we hear continually from our customers is how user-friendly our product is. From clients in finance and healthcare to education and government, they’re all impressed by how easy it is to build and deploy working dataflows using our tools. This is an advantage that we’ve worked really hard to cultivate. By optimizing our interface for navigability and design, we’re able to empower our customers to create and run their own data pipelines in minutes.
Finally, our stellar 24/7 customer support is another point of pride that allows us to deliver on the promise of customer-focused solutions consistently.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We have been working on extending our capabilities and developing faster, robust solutions that help businesses to speed up their data-to-insight journey. One of the major modules in our development pipeline is Astera Data Virtualization that would take data integration to a whole new level. One of the most anticipated developments we are excited about is the API integration platform, which would give users the ability to ingest and publish data from and to REST APIs. Aside from that, we are diligently working on expanding the range of connectors. Of course, we’re always working on performance upgrades so that our customers get a more seamless and reliable user experience.
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