Solution Provider Blueprint Technologies Aims To Accelerate Big Data Transformation With Its First Product, Conduit

Blueprint Technologies, a solution provider focused on digital transformation and cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, is branching out with a software product aimed at solving a key big data interconnection problem for the tech industry.

The product, Conduit, is targeted at customers that have made major investments in data platforms and business intelligence software, only to find out that the two sides can't easily connect to each other, said Chris Carter, Blueprint's managing director of technology and innovation.

"Most of the time they don't focus on lining up the two different sides of the technology investment," Carter said in an interview with CRN. "They can't surface the data to their end users ... So they have this gap, which is causing a lack of successful forward momentum for companies trying to make big data innovations, and change the nature of their business to be more measurable or predictive."

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Each time companies encounter this issue, "they don't want to have to bring somebody in to solve it," he added.

Blueprint, which has about 80 engineers, as well as many more technically adept employees out of its staff of 650, has developed Conduit to make massive data stores usable to customers, according to Carter. Conduit serves as an intermediary to "interconnect all of the different data sources that may exist in your organization," he said.

Conduit, which is Blueprint's first product, went into general availability in early May and is publicly available as a subscription for use in cloud environments. Blueprint also provides professional services to support the installation of Conduit into on-premises environments.

"It's one more arrow in our quiver when it comes to delivering value to our customers," said Tom Taylor, Blueprint's managing director of client development—noting that Conduit is "intended to be the first of many" products for his firm.

A key use case for Conduit is at companies in hybrid scenarios—with some of their data in the cloud and some in legacy systems, Taylor said.

"They want to leave it in their legacy systems in perpetuity ... But it turns out that [Microsoft] Power BI doesn't support the protocols that their legacy data store uses," Taylor said. "They can either live with it, or put engineering resources against solving that problem. Usually, writing protocol translations isn't the core competency of an organization. Or, in a couple clicks, they can plug Conduit into that scenario and suddenly Power BI has visibility to all of their data."

Founded in 2013, Blueprint Technologies is based in Bellevue, Wash., and has offices in Dallas, New York and Charlotte, N.C.