Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
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What is the TimeXtender Holistic Data Suite?
The TimeXtender Holistic Data Suite is a comprehensive, technology-agnostic solution designed to manage and optimize the entire data lifecycle. By integrating four essential tools—Data Integration, Master Data Management (MDM), Data Quality, and Orchestration—the suite provides a unified solution that automates, streamlines, and enhances every aspect of data management.
This comprehensive approach eliminates the complexities and inefficiencies associated with traditional, fragmented data stacks, enabling businesses to harness their data's full potential swiftly and cost-effectively.
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What is included in TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite
Our suite consists of 4 products:
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Data Integration: Rapidly ingest, prepare, and deliver business-ready data up to 10x faster through automated, AI-powered workflows and a unified, low-code interface.
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Master Data Management (MDM): Centralize and synchronize critical business data—such as customers, products, and vendors—across all departments and systems to ensure accuracy, consistency, and a single source of truth.
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Data Quality: Continuously monitor, validate, and cleanse data to maintain high standards of accuracy and reliability, ensuring trustworthy decision-making.
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Orchestration: Automate, monitor, and optimize complex data workflows end-to-end with real-time visibility and intelligent resource management, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.
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How does TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite streamline and optimize data management?
TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite streamlines data management by automating and integrating the entire data lifecycle—from ingestion to delivery—in the following ways:
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Unified Solution: Instead of using a patchwork of disconnected tools, TimeXtender provides a single suite that combines Data Integration, Master Data Management (MDM), Data Quality, and Orchestration. This ensures consistency, accuracy, and efficiency across the entire data pipeline, minimizing errors and reducing the complexity of managing multiple, disconnected tools from different vendors.
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Automation of Data Processes: TimeXtender automates complex tasks such as data integration, transformation, and documentation. By leveraging metadata and AI-driven automation, TimeXtender eliminates manual coding and repetitive tasks, significantly reducing the time and effort needed to manage data workflows.
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Drag-and-Drop Interface: With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, TimeXtender allows both technical and non-technical users to build and manage data workflows without needing extensive coding expertise. This democratizes data management and enables faster implementation and iteration.
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End-to-End Visibility and Governance: The suite provides full data lineage, audit trails, and compliance features, ensuring that all data management activities are transparent and meet regulatory standards. This holistic view of your data environment makes it easier to maintain governance and security while managing data efficiently.
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One-Click Deployment and Adaptability: TimeXtender allows for one-click deployment of data solutions across cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. This adaptability, along with one-click migration capabilities, ensures that your data infrastructure is future-proof and can easily scale as your needs evolve.
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Resource Management and Cloud Cost Optimization: TimeXtender optimizes performance and cost by providing precise control over cloud and on-premises resources. It enables automated scheduling and management of tasks across environments like Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, AWS, and SQL Server. By automating resource scaling, pausing unused services, and triggering machine learning jobs or data pipelines only when needed, TimeXtender ensures efficient resource utilization, minimizing costs while maintaining high performance.
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Can I purchase the products in TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite separately or as add-ons?
Yes, the products in TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite can be purchased separately or as add-ons. Each product—Data Integration, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Orchestration—operates as standalone solutions, allowing organizations to tailor their data management strategy to their specific needs.
If you are already using TimeXtender Data Integration, you can choose to enhance your setup by adding one or more of these products to address additional data challenges, such as master data management, data quality, or organization-wide orchestration. This flexibility ensures that you can build a customized solution that fits your unique requirements.
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What makes TimeXtender different and better than alternative options?
TimeXtender stands out from other data solutions due to its unique combination of automation, metadata-driven architecture, and holistic approach to data management.
Here are the key aspects that make it different and superior to alternative options:
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Comprehensive Suite of Data Management Tools: TimeXtender offers a Holistic Data Suite that includes products for Data Integration, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Orchestration. Each product addresses a critical aspect of data management and can be used independently or together, providing flexibility and ensuring consistency, accuracy, and efficiency across the entire data lifecycle.
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Portable Business Logic and One-Click Migration: TimeXtender separates business logic from the underlying storage layer, enabling you to design transformation and modeling logic once and deploy it across any environment—cloud, on-premises, or hybrid—with a single click. This technology-agnostic approach eliminates vendor lock-in and allows seamless migration to new storage technologies, future-proofing your data infrastructure without the need for rebuilding.
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Unified Metadata Framework: Unlike static metadata management tools, TimeXtender activates metadata for automation, governance, and compliance. This framework enables features like automatic code generation, data lineage, and real-time monitoring, ensuring that your entire data environment is not only agile and efficient but also governed and compliant with standards like GDPR and HIPAA.
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Universal Data Connectivity: TimeXtender offers extensive connectivity with a directory of pre-built, fully-managed data connectors and supports any custom data source. Whether integrating SaaS applications like Salesforce and HubSpot, handling various file formats, connecting to REST APIs, or linking to cloud and on-premises databases, TimeXtender ensures seamless data ingestion from any source.
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AI-Powered Data Automation: TimeXtender automates data integration workflows by using AI to generate all necessary code for extraction, transformation, and loading. This automated process ensures consistency and significantly reduces manual coding efforts, allowing users to focus on analyzing data to drive business value.
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Drag-and-Drop Transformation & Modeling: TimeXtender’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface enables users to easily cleanse, transform, and consolidate data without needing to write code. This streamlines the creation of a “single version of the truth,” ensuring accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing development time.
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Enterprise-Grade Security, Governance & Compliance: TimeXtender enhances security by only managing metadata, never directly accessing your data. It allows for granular access controls at various levels, supporting comprehensive governance and compliance with industry standards like GDPR and HIPAA. This robust security framework safeguards your data integrity while maintaining regulatory adherence.
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Modular, Reusable, Version-Controlled Data Flows: TimeXtender enables the creation of modular, reusable data flows that automatically adapt to changing data sources and business needs. When data sources change, adjustments are instantly propagated across the entire flow with just a few clicks, eliminating the need for manual debugging and reducing downtime.
By integrating these advanced functionalities into a single, cohesive suite, TimeXtender not only simplifies data management but also enhances scalability, reduces operational costs by up to 80%, and accelerates time-to-insight.
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What is TimeXtender’s Unified Metadata Framework?
TimeXtender's "Unified Metadata Framework" is the unifying force behind our holistic approach to data integration. It stores and maintains metadata for each data asset and object within the solution, serving as a foundational layer for various data integration, management, orchestration, and governance tasks.
The Unified Metadata Framework enables:
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Automatic code generation: Metadata and AI-driven automation reduces manual coding, accelerates development, and minimizes errors.
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Data lineage: It tracks the lineage of data assets, helping users understand the origin, transformation, and dependencies of their data.
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Data quality monitoring: The metadata framework assists in monitoring data quality, ensuring that the data being used is accurate, complete, and reliable.
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End-to-end orchestration: It helps orchestrate workflows and ensures smooth, consistent, and efficient execution of data integration tasks.
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Data governance: The framework supports holistic data governance, ensuring that data is collected, analyzed, stored, shared, and used in a consistent, secure, and compliant manner.
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And much more!
By utilizing metadata as the backbone of our solution, the Unified Metadata Framework enables a more efficient, agile, and automated approach to data integration, management, orchestration, and governance. This ultimately empowers organizations to build data solutions faster and drive business value more effectively.
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I've never heard of TimeXtender. Why should I trust you with managing my organization's business-critical data workflows?
At TimeXtender, we understand the critical role data workflows play in your organization’s success. With nearly two decades of experience, we’ve helped thousands of organizations manage their data efficiently and securely. Here’s why you can trust us to handle your business-critical data workflows:
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Experienced: Since 2006, we have been optimizing best practices and helping top-performing organizations, such as Komatsu, Colliers, and the Puerto Rican Government, build data solutions 10x faster than standard methods.
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Trusted: We have an unprecedented 95% retention rate with over 5,300 customers due to our commitment to simplicity, automation, and execution through our Xpeople, our powerful technology, and our strong community of over 200+ partners in 95 countries.
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Proven: Our holistic approach has been proven to reduce build costs by up to 70% and maintenance costs by up to 80%. See how much you can save with our calculator here: timextender.com/calculator
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Responsive: When you choose TimeXtender, you can choose to have one of our hand-selected partners help you get set up quickly and develop a data strategy that maximizes results, with ongoing support from our Customer Success and Solution Specialist Teams.
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Committed: We provide an active online community, comprehensive training and certifications, and weekly blog articles to help your whole team stay ahead of the curve as you grow.
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What kind of results have other organizations achieved by using TimeXtender?
Organizations using TimeXtender have achieved up to an 80% reduction in operational costs and up to 70% in data build costs by automating workflows and improving scalability. See how much you can save with our cost savings calculator here: timextender.com/calculator
You can also read in-depth case studies and see the real-world results our customers have achieved here.
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Why do I need TimeXtender if I can build my data warehouse myself?
Building a data warehouse manually using a stack of disconnected tools and custom-coded pipelines is not only time-consuming but also expensive. Each tool in the stack typically requires significant setup, configuration, and ongoing maintenance, while pipelines created with hand-written code are often brittle and prone to breaking with every change in the data sources or business requirements.
The process of manually integrating tools, ensuring compatibility, and rewriting code every time there’s an update is labor-intensive, requiring a high level of expertise. This can lead to costly delays, expensive troubleshooting, and high operational costs just to keep things running smoothly.
In contrast, TimeXtender automates these tasks with metadata-driven workflows and one-click deployment. This eliminates the need to manually write and maintain code, saving both time and money. Instead of constantly managing a patchwork of tools and fragile pipelines, TimeXtender allows you to focus on delivering value through insights, rather than being stuck in the cycle of maintaining your infrastructure.
Here’s why TimeXtender is a superior choice:
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Speed and Efficiency: TimeXtender’s Data Integration product automates complex data integration workflows using metadata and advanced AI, enabling you to ingest, prepare, and deliver business-ready data up to 10 times faster than manual methods. This rapid deployment enables your organization to build data solutions in minutes, not months.
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Cost Reduction: By automating data processes, TimeXtender can reduce your operational costs by 70%-80%, freeing up valuable resources to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual data management tasks.
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Comprehensive Toolset: TimeXtender integrates four essential tools—Data Integration, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Orchestration—into a single, unified suite. This comprehensive approach ensures consistency, accuracy, and efficiency across the entire data lifecycle, eliminating the need to manage multiple disconnected tools.
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Low-Code Environment: Our intuitive, drag-and-drop interface allows both technical and non-technical users to manage and utilize data without extensive coding knowledge. This democratizes data management, enabling lean data teams to achieve the productivity of much larger organizations.
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Scalability and Flexibility: TimeXtender’s suite is designed to adapt to evolving business needs and technologies, eliminating vendor lock-in and future-proofing your data infrastructure. This flexibility ensures that your data solutions can grow and evolve seamlessly alongside your business.
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Enhanced Security and Compliance: TimeXtender provides enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance features out-of-the-box, ensuring your data remains secure and meets regulatory standards like GDPR and HIPAA without the need for extensive custom configurations.
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Proven Reliability: Trusted by leading organizations across various industries, TimeXtender offers a secure, reliable, and compliant foundation for your data management needs, ensuring your data infrastructure is robust and dependable.
By choosing TimeXtender, you leverage a proven, efficient, and scalable solution that accelerates your data initiatives, reduces costs, and enhances data quality and governance, all of which are challenging to achieve with a self-built data warehouse..
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What are the key differences between traditional data pipelines and TimeXtender's "modern data flows"?
Traditional data pipelines require a high degree of manual coding and typically involve creating individual, siloed pipelines for each specific dashboard or report. This approach leads to the creation of a massive web of fragile pipelines, each requiring extensive custom coding and individual maintenance, resulting in a lack of cohesion and governance across the data infrastructure. The lack of flexibility in these pipelines makes adapting to new data sources or changing business needs both time-consuming and resource-intensive.
In contrast, TimeXtender's modern data flows offer a holistic approach to data integration. This method centralizes the flow of data into one streamlined process, enabling the creation of reusable, business-ready data products that can serve a wide range of reporting and analytical needs. This unified approach ensures consistency and governance across all data assets.
Our data flows are enhanced by low-code simplicity and metadata-driven automation, which significantly reduces manual coding and simplifies the data management process. This not only accelerates the development and deployment of data products but also ensures that they are more adaptable and efficient in meeting the evolving needs of the business.
You can read more about this topic here.
TimeXtender Data Integration
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What is TimeXtender Data Integration?
TimeXtender Data Integration is our core product that consolidates raw data from various sources into a centralized data lake or lakehouse. It enables ingestion, preparation, and delivery of business-ready data rapidly and efficiently. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can easily perform data transformations and modeling without writing complex code. This low-code environment not only simplifies the creation of a unified data layer but also ensures faster data preparation and more consistent, accurate insights across the organization
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How does TimeXtender Data Integration accelerate data processes?
TimeXtender Data Integration accelerates data processes by using advanced AI and metadata to automate code generation, drastically reducing the need for manual coding. This automation enables complex workflows, such as data ingestion, transformation, and delivery, to be executed up to 10 times faster. By utilizing metadata as a blueprint for structuring and managing data pipelines, TimeXtender ensures consistency and accuracy throughout the entire data lifecycle.
TimeXtender’s low-code environment further simplifies data handling, allowing users to perform advanced operations through a visual interface, while the system automatically generates the underlying code. This approach not only speeds up the deployment of data workflows but also minimizes human errors and reducing operational costs by up to 70%-80%. Through this automation, TimeXtender allows organizations to achieve more efficient and reliable data processes.
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What cloud data platforms does TimeXtender Data Integration support?
TimeXtender’s technology-agnostic approach supports deployment to various storage platforms.
Supported platforms include:
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Microsoft Azure
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Microsoft Fabric
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Microsoft SQL Server
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Snowflake
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AWS
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Support for additional cloud platforms is coming soon.
We provide a seamless experience across all supported platforms.
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What data sources can TimeXtender Data Integration connect to?
TimeXtender Data Integration allows you to quickly connect to and ingest data from a comprehensive directory of pre-built, fully-managed data connectors, with support for any custom data source, offering flexibility to integrate with a wide variety of systems:
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SaaS Applications: TimeXtender supports connections to popular SaaS platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Facebook, enabling seamless integration of cloud-based application data.
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Files: You can ingest data from various file formats, including Delta Parquet, JSON, XML, CSV, and Excel, making it easy to integrate structured and unstructured data.
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APIs: It offers connections to REST APIs and OData, allowing you to fetch data from web services or custom APIs.
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Cloud or On-Premises Databases: TimeXtender has connectors for nearly any type of database on the planet such as Snowflake, SQL, Synapse, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Oracle, DB2, Access and more.
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ERP Systems: TimeXtender connects to major ERP systems, such as SAP, ensuring that complex business data can be ingested and used for analytics.
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Custom Data Sources: TimeXtender Data Integration also provides support for any custom data source, ensuring flexibility for unique or proprietary systems.
This broad range of connectivity makes TimeXtender Data Integration a powerful tool for unifying data across diverse sources, ensuring all your business data can be leveraged effectively.
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What business intelligence and visualization tools does TimeXtender Data Integration support?
TimeXtender provides robust support for delivering data to various business intelligence and visualization tools, including Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI. Additionally, users can deliver data in CSV format, ensuring flexibility and compatibility with different data consumption needs.
TimeXtender allows you to easily deploy semantic models to your choice of visualization tool for fast creation and flexible modification of dashboards and reports.
TimeXtender's semantic models provide consistent fields and figures, ensuring all users are consuming a single version of truth, regardless of which visualization tool they are using.
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How does TimeXtender Data Integration handle changes in data sources, such as schema or API changes?
Whenever a change in your data sources or systems is made, TimeXtender allows you to instantly propagate those changes across the entire data environment with just a few clicks—no more manually debugging or fixing broken pipelines.
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What is the Semantic Layer?
The Semantic Layer, also known as the Delivery layer, is a simplified, business-friendly layer that provides a consistent and easy-to-understand view of all the data within an organization. It acts as a bridge between complex technical data models and end-users, allowing non-technical teams to access, explore, and use data without needing deep technical knowledge.
By translating the technical aspects of data (like fact and dimension tables) into everyday business terms, the Semantic Layer ensures that all users, regardless of their technical expertise, can easily work with the data. This improves data discovery, usability, and alignment across teams, promoting a single version of truth that is consistent across the organization.
The Semantic Layer also enables the creation of purpose-specific data products, which deliver only the relevant data to each business unit, and can be integrated with your choice of visualization tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik.
TimeXtender Master Data Management
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What is TimeXtender Master Data Management (MDM)?
TimeXtender MDM is a centralized tool that manages and synchronizes essential business data—such as customers, products, and vendors—across all departments and systems. It ensures data accuracy, consistency, and a single version of truth for informed decision-making.
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What features does TimeXtender Master Data Management (MDM) offer?
TimeXtender Master Data Management (MDM) offers a range of features designed to ensure consistency, accuracy, and control of critical business data across the organization. Key features include:
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Centralized Data Governance: Centralizes and harmonizes key data such as customers, products, and vendors, ensuring consistency across all business units.
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Data Accuracy and Consistency: Eliminates data redundancies and inconsistencies by centralizing and synchronizing master data, providing up-to-date and reliable information.
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Regulatory Compliance: Helps organizations meet regulatory standards like GDPR and HIPAA by maintaining strong data governance and quality.
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Seamless Integration: Integrates smoothly with existing IT infrastructure and data systems, minimizing disruption and accelerating time-to-value.
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Streamlined SKU and Item Mapping: Efficiently maps local SKUs and items into regional or global structures, ensuring data consistency across different organizational levels.
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Eliminate Reliance on Excel: Transitions from Excel-based data management to a centralized system, reducing risks and manual errors.
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Optimized Data Enrichment: Provides tools for enriching and mapping data before sending it to the next consumer, improving data quality and usability.
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Centralized KPI Management: Offers a dedicated home for KPIs and critical data, enhancing governance and access to key performance indicators across the organization.
These features empower organizations to maintain high-quality, consistent master data, supporting better decision-making and operational efficiency.
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Can TimeXtender Master Data Management integrate with existing systems?
Yes, TimeXtender MDM is a SaaS web app that seamlessly integrates with your current IT infrastructure and data systems, allowing for easy implementation with minimal disruption to existing operations.
TimeXtender Data Quality
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What is TimeXtender Data Quality?
TimeXtender Data Quality is a dedicated product that ensures the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of your data throughout its lifecycle. It provides automated data validation, cleansing, and monitoring, allowing organizations to establish and enforce quality standards across all data sources. Data Quality enables users to quickly detect and correct issues, ensuring that only trusted, high-quality data is used for decision-making, analytics, and reporting. This comprehensive solution reduces manual effort, improves compliance, and guarantees that your organization always works with reliable data.
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What features does TimeXtender Data Quality offer?
TimeXtender Data Quality provides continuous monitoring, validation, and cleansing of data. It includes:
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Continuous Operational Risk Monitoring: Monitors data in real-time to detect exceptions to business logic, ensuring operational risks are effectively mitigated.
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Flexible Data Quality Control: Allows rapid implementation of new data quality controls through an adaptable rule designer, addressing emerging data challenges swiftly.
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Intelligent Alerts and Notifications: Provides automated alerts for violations of data quality rules, enabling quick response to data issues.
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Comprehensive Data Issue Overview: Centralizes the management of data quality issues, offering full transparency and easy identification of problems across business processes.
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Efficient Responsibility Delegation: Streamlines accountability by enabling responsibility assignment, rule creation, and access to detailed logs and revision histories.
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Cost-Effective Quality Management: Reduces the costs associated with poor data quality by implementing controls that ensure more accurate and reliable business insights.
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Robust Data Quality Monitoring and Analysis: Tracks and reports on data quality KPIs, helping to measure the effectiveness of data quality initiatives.
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How does TimeXtender Data Quality monitoring work?
TimeXtender Data Quality monitoring works by continuously overseeing the quality of data across various business processes, ensuring that it adheres to predefined rules and standards. The monitoring system automatically checks data against these rules, identifying any discrepancies, inconsistencies, or issues such as missing values, duplicates, or violations of business logic, ensuring that only high-quality data is used for decision-making.
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What benefits does TimeXtender Data Quality provide?
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Improved Data Accuracy and Reliability: By continuously monitoring and validating data, TimeXtender ensures that data remains consistent, accurate, and free from errors, which enhances the reliability of insights and decision-making.
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Proactive Issue Detection: The system detects data quality issues in real-time, allowing for immediate corrective actions before they impact business operations, reducing the risks associated with poor-quality data.
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Cost Reduction: Automated data quality controls reduce the costs associated with manual data cleansing and rework, as well as the potential financial impact of making decisions based on flawed data, such as inaccurate billing or invoicing.
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Increased Efficiency: With automated alerts, centralized issue management, and customizable data quality rules, TimeXtender simplifies the management of data quality, allowing teams to resolve issues more efficiently and spend less time on manual tasks.
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Regulatory Compliance: TimeXtender supports compliance with data governance and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA, by maintaining high standards of data quality and offering audit trails for tracking and validation.
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Enhanced Transparency and Accountability: A centralized overview of data quality issues and detailed logs ensure that all data quality activities are transparent, traceable, and can be delegated to specific team members, promoting accountability.
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Can TimeXtender Data Quality integrate with existing systems?
Yes, TimeXtender Data Quality is a SaaS web app that seamlessly integrates with your current IT infrastructure and data systems, allowing for easy implementation with minimal disruption to existing operations.
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How does the Data Quality product work with TimeXtender Data Integration?
While TimeXtender Data Integration includes built-in data quality and governance features, the TimeXtender Data Quality product goes a step further. It provides advanced governance and quality measures for data sources and repositories that aren’t directly managed by our Data Integration product.
Available as a separate product or add-on, our Data Quality product ensures high-quality standards across all data assets in your organization.
TimeXtender Orchestration
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What is TimeXtender Orchestration?
TimeXtender Orchestration is a powerful solution that automates complex data workflows, reducing manual errors and improving operational efficiency. It integrates seamlessly with existing systems, offering real-time monitoring, customizable notifications, and advanced resource management capabilities such as scheduling scripts and API calls to optimize performance and minimize costs.
The intuitive interface makes it accessible to users of varying technical skills, while its scalable architecture easily adapts to growing data complexities. TimeXtender Orchestration also includes integrated data quality controls and compliance features, ensuring data accuracy and regulatory adherence across all processes.
By enhancing transparency, promoting self-service execution, and ensuring reliable pipeline execution, it makes data management more streamlined, efficient, and resilient.
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How does TimeXtender Orchestration improve data workflows?
TimeXtender Orchestration improves data workflows by automating the coordination and execution of complex data processes, reducing manual intervention, and minimizing errors. It provides real-time monitoring and customizable notifications, allowing for swift issue detection and resolution, ensuring that workflows remain smooth and resilient. By managing dependencies across different technologies, TimeXtender ensures that each part of the data workflow is executed in the correct order, preventing bottlenecks or interruptions.
Additionally, TimeXtender’s advanced resource management features, such as scheduling scripts and API calls, optimize resource utilization, helping to scale, pause, or trigger processes at the most efficient times. This not only maximizes performance but also reduces operational costs. By integrating data quality controls and compliance management, TimeXtender further ensures that only high-quality, compliant data is processed, resulting in more reliable and accurate workflows that support better decision-making.
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What resource management capabilities are included in TimeXtender Orchestration?
TimeXtender’s Orchestration product offers robust resource management capabilities that help optimize performance and control costs across cloud and on-premises environments. These capabilities ensure efficient resource utilization while maintaining high performance across multiple systems, including Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, AWS, and SQL Server:
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Automated Workflow Scheduling: TimeXtender Orchestration automates the scheduling of tasks like data ingestion, transformation, and reporting across multiple environments. This ensures that resources are allocated efficiently and tasks are executed at the most optimal times, reducing unnecessary resource use.
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Cross-Platform Resource Management: TimeXtender integrates data workflows across diverse systems, including Azure, AWS, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, and SQL Server. This enables seamless resource management across cloud and on-premises systems, ensuring that resources are allocated and used efficiently.
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Dynamic Resource Scaling: TimeXtender automates the scaling of resources based on workload demand. It can scale up during peak usage periods and scale down during low-demand times, preventing overuse and ensuring cloud cost optimization.
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Trigger-Based Execution: Machine learning jobs, data pipelines, or other resource-intensive tasks can be triggered only when needed, ensuring that resources are only consumed when necessary. This eliminates unnecessary resource usage and ensures that jobs run efficiently, minimizing costs while maximizing performance.
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Automated Pausing of Unused Services: TimeXtender Orchestration can automatically pause services that are not in use. This is particularly beneficial for reducing cloud costs, as unused resources are not kept running unnecessarily.
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Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts: TimeXtender provides monitoring capabilities to track the performance of data processes in real-time. Alerts are triggered for any performance issues, enabling quick resolutions and proactive resource management.
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Can TimeXtender Orchestration integrate with existing systems?
Yes, TimeXtender Orchestration is a SaaS web app that seamlessly integrates with your current IT infrastructure and data systems, allowing for easy implementation with minimal disruption to existing operations.
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Why would I need the Orchestration product if end-to-end orchestration is included in the Data Integration product?
End-to-end data process orchestration is included in every TimeXtender Data Integration package. However, for orchestrating organization-wide data processes and workflows that extend beyond the TimeXtender Data Integration environment, our Orchestration product is available as an add-on or standalone solution. It ensures efficient execution of every step in your data journey across all systems and platforms.
AI and Automation
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How does TimeXtender incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into its solutions?
TimeXtender leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance and automate various aspects of its Holistic Data Suite, significantly improving efficiency, accuracy, and user experience:
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AI-Powered Data Automation:
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Unified Metadata Framework: TimeXtender’s AI utilizes the comprehensive metadata stored in the Unified Metadata Framework to automate code generation, orchestration, data lineage tracking, and documentation. This ensures that all data processes are intelligently managed and optimized.
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Automated Code Generation: TimeXtender uses AI to automatically generate the necessary code for extracting, loading, and transforming data. This ensures that data integration workflows follow industry best practices, reducing the likelihood of errors and speeding up the development process.
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Intelligent Execution Engine: Powered by AI, this execution engine automates and optimizes every step of the data integration workflow, from extraction to delivery. It offers seamless end-to-end orchestration, multi-threaded processing, real-time monitoring, and incremental data loads, all designed to enhance performance, boost efficiency, and reduce costs.
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AI-Driven Recommendations: The TimeXtender Performance Recommendations Tool provides intelligent suggestions such as merging conditional lookups, changing and aligning lookup operators, stopping the use of deprecated options, changing hashing algorithms, disabling troubleshooting options, and verifying automatic indexes.
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XPilot – Your AI Data Integration Co-Pilot:
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Intelligent Guidance: XPilot acts as an AI-powered assistant, providing intelligent, context-aware answers to guide users through their data integration journey.
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Precise Code Generation: XPilot automates tasks by generating precise code snippets tailored to specific data integration needs, further reducing the need for manual coding and enhancing productivity.
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Instant Insights: XPilot offer, real-time insights and recommendations, helping users make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
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By integrating AI into its core functionalities, TimeXtender not only automates repetitive tasks but also enhances the overall efficiency and reliability of data management processes. This allows organizations to focus on leveraging data for strategic decision-making rather than getting bogged down by manual data handling tasks.
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How does XPilot work within the Holistic Data Suite?
XPilot is an AI-powered data integration co-pilot designed to enhance the user experience within TimeXtender's Holistic Data Suite. Built on advanced generative AI technology, XPilot functions as an intelligent assistant that helps users navigate and utilize TimeXtender's suite of data tools.
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Real-Time Support and Troubleshooting:
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Immediate Assistance: XPilot offers real-time support by allowing users to ask questions and troubleshoot errors directly within their TimeXtender interface.
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Context-Aware Help: It provides immediate, context-aware support, making it easier to find relevant information and resolve issues quickly.
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Enhanced User Experience: This feature significantly improves productivity and user satisfaction by reducing the time spent on resolving technical challenges.
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Centralized Knowledge Hub:
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Unified Resources: XPilot acts as a centralized knowledge hub by combining resources from TimeXtender’s user manuals, community forums, and support tickets.
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Easy Access to Information: Users can access a wealth of information in one place, streamlining the process of finding solutions and best practices.
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Learning and Development: This hub aids in user education, helping teams to better understand and leverage the capabilities of the Holistic Data Suite.
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Intelligent Code Generation:
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SQL and DAX Code Generation: XPilot assists in generating SQL and DAX code, reducing the need to write code manually and minimizing the potential for errors.
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Design Pattern Suggestions: It provides suggestions for design patterns, helping users implement efficient and effective data solutions.
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Improving Productivity and Satisfaction:
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Enhanced Efficiency: The combination of real-time support and automation leads to more efficient workflows and faster project completion times.
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User Satisfaction: By simplifying complex tasks and reducing frustrations associated with troubleshooting, XPilot improves overall user satisfaction.
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Continuous Improvement: XPilot's AI capabilities allow it to learn and improve over time, providing increasingly valuable assistance as it interacts with users.
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By integrating XPilot into the Holistic Data Suite, TimeXtender empowers users to harness the full potential of their data tools, facilitating a more effective and enjoyable data management experience.
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Roles and Benefits
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How does the Holistic Data Suite benefit Business Leaders (CEOs, CFOs, COOs)?
Business Leaders benefit by gaining faster, more reliable insights from their organization’s data, which directly supports better decision-making and business growth. Key advantages include:
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Faster access to trustworthy data for informed, data-driven decisions, ensuring that the organization can respond swiftly to market changes and opportunities.
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Higher operational efficiency through automation, reducing costs associated with manual data processes and minimizing delays in data preparation and reporting.
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Flexibility to adapt to business needs, as the suite’s modular design allows for tailored data solutions that can scale as the organization grows.
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Improved collaboration between technical and non-technical teams, as the suite's low-code and intuitive tools empower all users to work with data effectively without heavy reliance on IT.
For Business Leaders, the suite transforms data into a valuable asset, driving performance, innovation, and competitiveness.
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How does the Holistic Data Suite benefit Data Leaders (CIOs, IT Managers, Data Governance Officers)?
Data Leaders benefit from TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite by gaining centralized control over data governance, security, and compliance. The suite enables:
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Comprehensive governance across all data assets with consistent data standards and policies, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
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Automated processes that reduce the need for extensive manual oversight, allowing leaders to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational challenges.
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Unified infrastructure that simplifies the management of complex data ecosystems, ensuring scalability and agility as data needs grow.
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Transparency and visibility into data workflows through automated lineage and metadata management, making it easier to track data usage and ensure accountability.
Overall, Data Leaders can streamline operations, mitigate risks, and ensure the organization's data management strategy aligns with business goals.
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How does the Holistic Data Suite benefit Data Movers (Data Architects, Engineers, Developers)?
Data Movers benefit from TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite in several important ways:
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Universal Data Connectivity: TimeXtender Data Integration provides quick and seamless connections to a variety of data sources, including SaaS applications (like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Google Analytics), files (such as Delta Parquet, JSON, and CSV), REST APIs, cloud databases (Azure, Snowflake), on-premises databases, ERP systems, and more. Additionally, it offers support for any custom data source, ensuring flexibility to handle unique or proprietary systems.
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Unified and Secure Infrastructure: The suite offers a centralized, secure data environment that enforces governance and security protocols, while remaining scalable. This gives Data Movers confidence that their data environments are well-managed and ready to grow with organizational needs.
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Automated Data Integration Workflows: The suite automates key tasks like data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration, reducing manual work. This allows Data Movers to concentrate on high-value projects such as optimizing data architectures and designing advanced solutions.
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Version Control for Data Workflows: TimeXtender provides built-in version control for all data workflows, allowing Data Movers to track changes, roll back to previous versions, and collaborate more effectively. This ensures that all modifications are documented and reversible, which helps prevent errors and enhances overall data management quality.
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Enhanced Flexibility and Control: While automation reduces manual tasks, Data Movers retain the option to implement custom code for advanced needs, giving them flexibility and control over the data integration process.
In summary, TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite equips Data Movers with universal data connectivity, automation, and flexibility, allowing them to build scalable, secure, and efficient data infrastructures with minimal manual effort.
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How does the Holistic Data Suite benefit Data Users (BI Professionals, Analysts, Data Scientists)?
Data Users benefit from TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite in several key ways:
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Quick Creation of Business-Ready Data Products: TimeXtender’s low-code interface, paired with AI-powered automation, allows Data Users to quickly prepare, transform, and deliver business-ready data products. This means Data Users can focus on generating insights rather than managing data preparation manually.
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Continuous Data Quality Monitoring: With advanced data governance and quality features, Data Users can ensure that the data they work with is always clean, reliable, and up to the highest standards. This enhances confidence in the data being used for reports, dashboards, and analysis, leading to better decision-making.
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Automated Data Lineage: TimeXtender automatically tracks data lineage, giving Data Users a clear view of where data originates, how it has been transformed, and how it moves through the system. This transparency simplifies troubleshooting and enhances trust in data outputs.
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Faster Access to Insights: With seamless data integration and automated processes, Data Users can access data quickly, enabling faster, more agile decision-making. This helps them stay ahead of trends, optimize processes, and provide timely insights to key stakeholders.
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Low-Code Flexibility: The suite’s low-code environment empowers Data Users to work directly with data without relying on IT teams, speeding up the creation of reports and analytics models. It offers flexibility while keeping the process efficient and scalable.
In summary, TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite empowers Data Users with automation, high-quality data, and real-time monitoring, allowing them to produce valuable, business-ready data products quickly and confidently.
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Can I see customer success stories?
Yes! TimeXtender has numerous case studies available here from satisfied customers across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, government, construction, transportation, logistics, finance, and more.
Security and Compliance
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How does TimeXtender ensure data security?
TimeXtender ensures data security by leveraging a metadata-driven approach, which means that it never directly accesses or moves your actual data. Instead, it uses metadata to manage data flows and operations without touching the underlying data itself. This approach minimizes the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access.
Key security features include:
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Granular Access Control: TimeXtender allows precise control over who can view or modify specific datasets, down to individual tables or rows, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data.
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Data Lineage and Documentation: TimeXtender tracks the entire data lifecycle and automatically generates comprehensive documentation of the entire data environment, making it easier to ensure data governance and transparency.
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Encryption and Secure Data Handling: TimeXtender operates within secure environments like Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and AWS, ensuring that all data transmission and storage are protected using the secure protocols provided by these platforms, including encryption and secure API connections. While TimeXtender doesn't directly handle the data, it ensures that all processes occur within these secure frameworks.
By focusing on metadata, TimeXtender enhances security, ensures compliance, and significantly reduces the risk of handling sensitive or critical data.
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Does the suite comply with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA?
Yes, TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite supports comprehensive governance and compliance with industry standards such as GDPR and HIPAA, ensuring your data handling meets regulatory requirements.
Deployment and Flexibility
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How long does it take to implement TimeXtender?
TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite is designed for rapid and efficient implementation, significantly reducing the time traditionally required for deploying comprehensive data management solutions. Typically, organizations can expect to complete the implementation within a few weeks, as opposed to months or years, depending on factors such as the size of the data environment, the complexity of existing systems, and specific business requirements.
However, many of our customers are up and running with a fully-functioning data warehouse in a matter of days.
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What should I expect during implementation?
During implementation, expect a quick and efficient process, typically completed within days to a few weeks depending on your data environment’s size and complexity. The steps include:
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Assessment and Planning: Understanding your current data environment and defining specific objectives to tailor the implementation process.
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Configuration and Integration: Setting up the Holistic Data Suite components—Data Integration, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Orchestration—to align with your data workflows.
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Data Migration and Setup: Ingesting existing data sources, configuring transformation rules, and establishing governance frameworks.
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Training and Enablement: Equipping your team with the necessary skills through training resources and certifications to effectively utilize the suite.
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Go-Live and Optimization: Launching the solution and fine-tuning configurations to ensure optimal performance and address any initial challenges.
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What kind of post-implementation support can I expect?
After deployment, TimeXtender continues to support your organization through ongoing training, access to a rich library of resources, and assistance from our dedicated Customer Success team. This ensures that your data management processes remain efficient, scalable, and aligned with evolving business needs.
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How user-friendly is TimeXtender?
TimeXtender is exceptionally user-friendly, catering to both technical and non-technical users with its low-code interface, AI-powered automation, and comprehensive support resources.
For less-technical business users, our tools offer an easy entry point to manage and analyze data without requiring deep technical skills.
Meanwhile, highly-technical users can fully utilize TimeXtender’s robust features and customization options to handle complex data integration and management tasks.
This dual approach ensures that organizations can maximize TimeXtender’s potential across diverse roles and expertise levels, fostering collaboration and efficiency in data management processes.
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How developer-friendly is TimeXtender?
TimeXtender Data Integration offers a range of tools and features to extend its capabilities. For example, developers can use user-defined functions, stored procedures, reusable snippets, PowerShell script executions, and custom code, if needed. This allows for greater flexibility in data integration workflows and customization to fit specific business needs.
Additionally, TimeXtender Data Integration supports version control and allows for separate development and testing environments, making it easy for developers to identify and fix bugs before deploying to production.
Overall, TimeXtender aims to automate the development, testing, and orchestration of data projects, while still offering developers the tools they need for greater customization and control.
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How does TimeXtender integrate with my existing data infrastructure?
TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite integrates seamlessly with your existing data infrastructure.
Our Data Integration product overlays and accelerates your current systems, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft SQL Server, Snowflake, and AWS.
TimeXtender Data Integration allows you to quickly connect to and ingest data using our directory of pre-built, fully-managed connectors, with additional support for any custom data source. This includes a wide range of data types, such as SaaS applications (Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics), files (Delta Parquet, JSON, CSV), REST APIs, cloud databases, on-premises databases, ERP systems, and more.
TimeXtender Data Integration also integrates with your visualization tool of choice, such as Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik.
Additionally, the Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Orchestration products are true SaaS web apps that can be added to any data infrastructure or tool stack for enhanced flexibility.
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How does TimeXtender prevent vendor lock-in?
TimeXtender prevents vendor lock-in by adopting a technology-agnostic, metadata-driven approach that ensures flexibility across various data environments. Here's how:
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Separation of Business Logic from Storage: TimeXtender was the first to separate business logic from the underlying storage layer. This means your transformation and modeling logic is not tied to a specific database or cloud provider. You can design your data workflows in TimeXtender and deploy them to any storage technology—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid setup—without needing to rewrite or reconfigure anything.
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One-Click Migration: With TimeXtender, migrating your data infrastructure to a new environment is simple. TimeXtender allows you to move from one storage solution to another (e.g., from on-premises to a cloud platform like Azure or AWS) with a single click. Because TimeXtender handles the code generation and optimization automatically, you don’t have to worry about costly or time-consuming migration projects.
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Technology-Agnostic Framework: TimeXtender is compatible with a wide range of data sources, cloud platforms, and storage technologies, including Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, and AWS. This flexibility allows you to switch between different technologies as your needs evolve, without being locked into a single vendor.
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Future-Proof Infrastructure: By treating business logic as independent and portable, TimeXtender ensures that your data solutions can evolve as technology changes. As new storage or compute technologies become available, you can migrate to them seamlessly, protecting your organization from being locked into outdated systems.
This vendor-neutral approach allows businesses to adapt and grow without being restricted by their initial technology choices, ensuring long-term flexibility and control over their data environment.
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How does TimeXtender support scalability and adapt to growing data needs?
TimeXtender supports scalability and adapts to growing data needs by offering a flexible, efficient, and future-proof solution for managing data infrastructure. Here’s how:
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Efficient Data Processing: TimeXtender supports features like incremental data loading, ensuring that only new or updated data is processed. This reduces processing times and optimizes resource usage, making it easy to scale data operations efficiently.
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Automation and AI: TimeXtender leverages AI and automation to optimize data workflows, reducing manual tasks and increasing efficiency. This ensures that as your data volume and complexity grow, your organization can maintain productivity without requiring a larger data management team.
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Flexible Deployment and One-Click Migration: TimeXtender is compatible with cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructures, allowing your organization to scale across different environments as needed. As your data needs evolve, TimeXtender enables seamless migration to new storage technologies or environments with a single click. This adaptability ensures that your data infrastructure remains future-proof, scaling effortlessly with minimal disruption as technology changes.
By providing these scalable and adaptable features, TimeXtender ensures that your data infrastructure can grow alongside your business, handling increased data loads and evolving technological needs with ease.
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Does TimeXtender support real-time/streaming data processing?
In the batch vs. streaming debate, it’s important to remember that any time data is processed to ensure data quality and reliability, a certain amount of lag time is unavoidable. Because of this, stream processing is only suitable for very simple datasets and use cases, such as streaming website traffic, call volumes, stock prices, etc. There are many simple tools that allow you to connect to these data sources to create real-time analytics dashboards.
However, batch processing allows for thorough and accurate data cleansing, transformation, and modeling, which makes it the preferred method for more complex and business-critical analytics workflows. These are the types of workflows TimeXtender focuses on.
Regardless, the near real-time analytics that TimeXtender’s batch processing provides is more than sufficient to meet an organization’s needs in the vast majority of cases.
Getting Started
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How can I learn more or get a demonstration of the Holistic Data Suite?
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Do you have partners that can assist me in implementing TimeXtender inside my organization?
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Where can I access training and support?
TimeXtender an extensive variety of support and training options for its users. These include:
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Knowledge base: TimeXtender offers extensive documentation and a knowledge base you can access here to help users learn about the product and troubleshoot issues.
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XPilot: XPilot is TimeXtender's AI-powered data integration co-pilot that provides real-time assistance and interactive support. You can chat with XPilot here.
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Online community: TimeXtender has an online community you can access here where users can connect with each other, share tips and best practices, and ask for help.
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Troubleshooting tips: View tips for troubleshooting most issues here.
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Technical support: You can submit a support ticket either by filling out this form or by emailing support@timextender.com
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Partner network: TimeXtender has a network of partners who provide additional support and services, including training, implementation, and ongoing support. You can find a partner here.
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TimeXtender Training Course: The TimeXtender Course is an online training platform that offers a range of courses and certifications for users to learn about the product and become certified TimeXtender professionals. You can access the Training Course here.
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What is the pricing structure for TimeXtender?
Please go to our Pricing page here to view our pricing and packaging options.
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Does TimeXtender offer discounts for non-profits and educational institutions?
Yes, TimeXtender offers special, discounted for non-profit organizations and educational institutions. Contact us to learn more.
Have more questions?
Reach out to us for general inquiries, contact our support team for technical assistance either by filling out this form or by emailing support@timextender.com, or book a demo to explore how TimeXtender’s Holistic Data Suite can meet your specific data management needs.