The University of Michigan, as a public research institution, houses an incredible amount of data. One of the struggles that leaders and analysts face is how to easily pull together data from the vast number of sources currently available to help gain insights on many topics and improve decision making.
That work just got a bit easier. In January, 2021, Information and Technology Services (ITS) announced that they were making data virtualization tool Denodo at U-M available free of charge to all U-M staff and faculty.
What is Denodo at U-M? And how does it improve your ability to access important institutional data?
Denodo at U-M is a data virtualization tool. Data virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve, manipulate, and combine data from multiple disparate sources without requiring technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted at source, or where it is physically located. This provides for a single customer view of the overall data.
“Denodo has already proven to be a successful and important tool for our campus.”
Amber MacKenzie, ITS director of data and analytics
Some of the benefits of using Denodo for your data virtualization needs are:
- Easy access to all types of data
- Full data integration and data modeling capabilities
- Fast, intelligent execution of data queries.
Denodo was piloted for several months as part of the Michigan Insights On Demand Program (MIND). According to Amber MacKenzie, ITS director of data and analytics and the program director for MIND: “Denodo has already proven to be a successful and important tool for our campus. One example of this value is how it has enabled ITS to successfully pull data from many sources to create the COVID-19 dashboards needed by the university. Having the ability to pull different types of data from several sources in an easy and efficient way, has saved our teams considerable time and effort.”
Vijay Thiruvengadam, executive director for Information Quest (IQ), added that “we are very excited to offer – at no charge – this capability to others on the U-M campus, and we believe that this tool will enhance the university’s ability to report valuable information to both internal as well as external audiences.”
