Announcing Hallowed Honeycrisp: Our new release of Sidra Data Platform

When we speak about Sidra to the organizations we collaborate with, we speak about helping them to set up a complete business data strategy and leverage their siloed data in a fast and governed way.

Sidra is our solution of Data Platform in Azure to provide organizations of any size with a Data Lake enterprise infrastructure.  Sidra helps to reduce costs and increase employee productivity while ensuring security and compliance.

The innovative design of Sidra allows to scalarly unlock a potentially unlimited number of business data use cases, ranging from BI analytics to knowledge mining and AI-infused scenarios.

This is possible thanks to a scalable and extensible architecture, which decouples data ingestion from exploitation via advanced automated workflows and integrations. This decoupling achieves enterprise governance and extensibility. All this while still allowing the highest level of enriched and customized data availability at the level of data consumption.

With each release, we are not only adding new functionalities to expand the reach and variety of use cases, but we are also incorporating future-proof optimizations to improve the overall experience of setting up Sidra.

We are proud to share here with you our latest release 2020.R3 of Sidra Data Platform: Hallowed Honeycrisp.

Sidra Data Platform: What’s new in 2020.R3

In this release, we continue building upon the observability and operability of Sidra platform, as well as growing the interoperability with the Client Applications ecosystem to unlock multiple use cases regarding Analytics and Knowledge Mining.

While we are working on the future Web UI capabilities that will greatly contribute to speed up operational processes of setting up data connectors and Client Applications, for this release we wanted to continue delivering on experience improvements.

One of such key features is the new Sidra deployment tool, which now greatly simplifies deployments and upgrades. Another important pillar is the offering of a new section on the web, called Authorizations, which leverages the built-in Balea Authorization framework of the previous release. This interface now allows you to assign and manage group and granular authorizations to users and applications at the reach of a few clicks.

Data Governance is a key pillar of Sidra, and as such Sidra comes with a Data Catalog with embedded security. With this release, we now offer a new pre-packaged set of operational Power BI reports. These reports provide a dynamic and interactive view of the whole data intake in action. From an overview of key data intake indicators, users can now drill through figures for details, as well as gather trend insights on ingested volumes and anomalies.

This version also represents a step forward in our strategy to consolidate and grow capabilities of our Knowledge Store, related to the ingestion and AI insights generation of unstructured data sources (e.g. PDF, DOCX files). On one hand, we have made improvements to the integration with Azure Cognitive Search services. On the other hand, we have delivered a flagship Client Application, called Contract Analysis, which sets the foundation of Knowledge Store and showcases its power in a specific but easily customizable and extensible business case.

Here is a list of the most relevant improvements made to the platform as part of this release:

• New Sidra deployment tool
• New Operational DW and Reports
• New Web UI section for Authorization Management
• Improvements in the Cognitive Search pipelines
• Contract Analysis Client Application leveraging Knowledge Mining pipelines
• Metadata inference API for CSV files
• New Application Insights Custom Events
• Updated Batch account API version
• Unified SignalR hubs for generic handling of notifications
• Automatic creation of staging tables for SQL client pipeline

We hope you enjoy this new version!

If you have any questions or want to know more about this release, you can visit the documentation.