UBS needed to comply with regulations put in place to strengthen systems for risk data aggregation and internal risk reporting in the wake of the 2007 global financial crisis. Specifically, UBS sought compliance with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued standard 239 (BCBS 239).UBS built an application called Group Data Dictionary (GDD) as its data lineage and data governance tool.The first iteration was built on Oracle, but UBS soon discovered limitations with an RDBMS approach, which relies on JOINS to connect data across tables. UBS decided it needed a better solution suited to creating real-time data lineage visualizations and exporting lineage information for ad-hoc analysis via Excel.

Cybersecurity researchers at MITRE needed to go beyond rudimentary assessments of security posture and attack response. Doing so required merging isolated data into higher-level knowledge of network-wide attack vulnerabilities and mission readiness.Noel and his team also struggled with fully comprehending a given security environment and mapping all known vulnerabilities. Specifically, these goals demanded a flexible architecture that accommodated advanced analytics, ad hoc queries and graph visualization, all of which they then lacked.

Novartis faced the challenge of combining its historical data stores with this burgeoning phenotypic data. They also needed a way to place all this data within the larger context of ongoing medical research from around the world. The Novartis team wanted to combine its data with medical information from NIH’s PubMed. PubMed contains about 25 million abstracts from some 5,600 scientific journals.The Novartis team sought a way to empower researchers to ask questions connecting the dots between all of this data in the context of the latest medical research.

They had limited visibility of what they had delivered before, they needed to do more than simply list everything in a database. Wanted to be able to map and match capabilities onto what they were hearing from the client, and what they were saying in their strategy papers and company reports, to present the ideal recommendation and create the most effective transformation roadmap – and do this in real-time, in client meetings.