Data on Demand Korea is a company that doesn't want to sell you anything. Instead, they'd like you to rent it. Software, that is. The company is bringing the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) to the Korean market. It is also doing data integration, putting together all the disjointed information archives that a company develops over time. Scott Lee, the president of the company, explained how it all works in an interview with the Korea IT Times this month.
Software as a Service
In the traditional model of business information technology services, a company hires a team of dedicated programmers, explains the requirements for software to them, and they misunderstand it and write up some customized software that almost, but not quite, satisfies the requirements. This is an expensive and time-consuming IT service model, because it requires an entire department full of dedicated specialists to create the same custom software that has been used countless times before in other companies. Address lists, customer lists, work orders, unified email and messaging services - all of these things are required for businesses to work and grow effectively.
And developing all of these services comes with the same problems - scalability, interoperability, backwards compatibility. These are the standard problems of IT infrastructure development, and they always exist. The solutions to these problems have been developed, tested, refined, and implemented a thousand times or more, in different proprietary environments. But if there is one thing that programming will teach you about life, it is that after you do something once you should never have to do it again. Instead, you should reference the previous process in your next program, saving yourself some time. Software as a Service does that on a larger scale than programs, it does it for business practices. Instead of reinventing the wheel again for your specific company, you can access a database of thousands of tried and proven software solutions, priced with a subscription model and tailored specifically for your business.
Data on Demand represents one of the largest and best known global SaaS companies - Salesforce.com. Their services are used by companies such as Merrill Lynch, Sprint, Expedia.com, and Symantec, but are also priced to be affordable to small 10 man businesses as well.
Data Integration
But that's not all they do. The company is specifically designed to take care of all the IT needs that small, medium, and large companies have - from data management, data integration, data migration, application integration, data quality and management, and data consolidation. Say you are a company that has a web site that requires registrations.
Eventually you'll develop a large database full of people's usernames, passwords, email addresses, and whatever other information they care to share with your company. You also have a mailing list which your company has also been maintaining since before the Internet was created.
One day, your CEO wants to run some demographic analysis on the two groups - everybody who has ever signed up to the web site and all the people on the mailing list as well. The mailing list has been computerized in a database, but the database is on another computer, in another format, and completely different from the web site database. Running the demographic information on the two different databases would not give enough useful information. Suddenly, you realize that you need to integrate the two databases and have no idea how to do that. This is the point at which you should call Scott Lee.
Data On Demand Korea was established in May 2007. The company has a partnership with other data integration experts in other countries including Japan, China, Australia, and the European Union, making it a part of a global enterprise.
