Arcion this week released its cloud-native, zero-code data mobility platform that seeks to break down the concept of data silos and enables enterprises to extract value from real-time data.

Arcion hopes to take advantage of the opportunity that sits between transactional databases and the places people want to consume that data, like Snowflake or Databricks, Arcion CEO Gary Hagmueller told SDxCentral. "Our view is we're going to go and power that" by allowing information to flow freely in transactional or production databases.

"It's something that, although a lot of people talk about, it's not really widely done. There's really nobody else that does it in a cloud-native, super real-time, very effective sort of way." And Arcion's plan is to build that out, Hagmueller said.

Despite the industry's history of massive trend shifts, one that has remained constant is vendors' desires to create lock-in. "The more data they can contain within their ownership or walled garden or whatever you want to call it, the more valuable they're going to be," Hagmueller explained. This creates silos, or collections of data only one group in an organization can access.

According to Hagmueller, silos are detrimental in the cloud era because data is most valuable when it's free to use wherever and whenever it's needed. "Our vision at the end of the day is to be the final piece that breaks down all of those silos because we sit on top of these systems, we're in a unique place that can actually break down those silos, and we have a technology that truly can break it down," Hagmueller said.

Arcion's technology works well in real-time because it uses something called change data capture. When something gets written into a database, there's a similar transaction recorded in its logs for auditing and troubleshooting purposes. But Arcion focuses on alternative applications of that transactional information and other reasons it's useful.

"Most IT people don't really want people hacking around in their databases, because who knows what could happen? So there's the security implication of it," Hagmueller said. There's also a production impact if you're poking around in a database because the processor has to run queries and perform other tasks, which slows things down.

Arcion's use of change data capture saves time by reading and recording information instead, and "frees IT organizations and big companies from having to think about that," he explained.

But here is where the difficulty arises. "The logs themselves are not a database. They're a bunch of entries. To actually reassemble them, you almost have to create your own database. You just don't need to keep it in a storage unit like you do in a traditional database," Hagmueller said. That's what Arcion does on the customer side.

Another level of complexity to Arcion's tech is translating data for consumption. If a customer is taking data out of Oracle and moving it into Snowflake, for example, the platform has to be able to translate how schemas work, how data was recorded, or any number of things.

And while relational databases are relatively easy to translate between, "it gets weirder" to translate between something like Mongo, which is a document-based database, and a relational database. This complexity, which Arcion claims to have tackled, also explains why "it's super hard for people to just duplicate what we're doing here," Hagmueller added.

The vendor raised $13 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from strategic investor Databricks. Arcion is also partnering with Snowflake, SingleStore, and YugabyteDB, and Hagmueller said additional partnerships are likely to be signed soon.

The motivation behind these partnerships is quite simple. "We're moving into a cloud-based world," Hagmueller said. "People will do what they need to do on whatever platform best suits what they want," so it's best to dip the company toes in many different pools.

Arcion's main challenge is "to rise above the din and make sure that people understand the true difference of what we do versus others," but Hagmueller looks forward to this with confidence.

Finding employees equipped to handle the complex technology Arcion is building remains another challenge, according to Hagmueller. The employees he needs to bring onboard are "people who have fairly deep database skills, who have maybe built production databases before or understand them deeply. And that's a hard skill set to find," he explained.

Finally, Hagmueller acknowledges companies will continue increasing the amount of data stored in data warehouses, which will make scaling more difficult, but he views this as an opportunity. To that end, Arcion plans to get more involved with its customers by helping them understand how to architect that move in a cost effective way, he said.