Team Astera recently attended the AIRI 2022 IT Summit as one of the official sponsors of the event. The team met with numerous industry leaders and demonstrated our unified, end-to-end data management platform, including our data warehouse automation solution, Astera DW Builder.

Event Overview

The Association of Independent Research Institutes (AIRI) is an association of independent, not-for-profit (NFP) biomedical and behavioral research institutes. Founded in 1961, the association’s mission is to enhance the ability of its members to improve human health and advance knowledge.

AIRI held its seventh AIRI IT Summit on June 8 and 9 in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Stowers Institute. The event featured leading enterprises, including DELL Technologies, IBM Security, ITK Solutions Group, and Oracle among others.

The IT Summit was the association’s first in-person event after the pandemic. It allowed industry leaders to network and gain insights to tackle modern data challenges and adapt to the ‘new normal.’

Highlights of the Event

The AIRI 2022 IT Summit helped us understand the data management use-cases and requirements of research institutes, particularly the need for data vaults and data warehousing. Here are some key highlights of the events:

Astera DW Builder Demo by La Jolla Institute for Immunology

John Stillwagen, Senior Director, Management Information System, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, showcased our enterprise-grade data warehouse automation solution, Astera DW Builder, at the summit. The integrated platform allows organizations to design, develop, and deploy high-volume data warehouses in a matter of weeks.

John demonstrated how the solution allows users to build automated data pipelines and simplify dimension and fact loading jobs. He highlighted the significant time savings achieved by designing an enterprise-grade data warehouse in a zero-code environment.

Impressed by the platform’s cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and scalability, several attendees showed interest in Astera DW Builder. The idea of a unified data management platform resonated with many business leaders looking to design a consolidated data repository for analytics and research.

Equipped with a high-performance parallel processing engine, Astera DW Builder can handle enterprise-level data loads. Using the metadata-driven approach, the solution allows companies to fast-track the process of building on-prem and cloud data warehouses. Moreover, it supports industry-leading cloud providers like Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Redshift.

The Emergence of Data Vaults

Session 8 on Day 2 focused on how data vault architecture facilitates the rapid development of an enterprise data warehouse. It provided meaningful insights on how a data vault can facilitate data governance, reporting, and integrations/APIs. As a data warehouse automation provider that supports all the common data modeling patterns, including data vault, star schema, and 3NF, it was an interesting session for the attendees.

Commenting on the data vaults modeling, Mike Alford (VP of Global Sales) stated,

“Data vault was one of the most popular topics of the event. Many organizations consider data vault as the next big thing. The good thing is that our zero-code data warehouse automation solution [Astera DW Builder] already supports data vault, among other common data modeling patterns. It’d be interesting to see how data vault emerges, or even compliments, other data modeling patterns, like star schema and 3NF in the future”

The Final Words

Our code-free data management platform with automated data warehousing capabilities sparked a lot of interest among data professionals. We spoke to several business leaders of independent research institutes across the country and learned about their unique data management requirements. Our team also discussed how the unified platform could help accelerate the data warehousing design and time-to-insight.

The AIRI 2022 IT Summit provided us with a wealth of insights that will help us serve our customers with greater confidence. We want to thank John Stillwagen for inviting us to the event and look forward to collaborating on more projects in the future.