The following is an excerpt from Achieve Agile Analytics at Scale with Syncfusion, part of Syncfusion’s collection of white papers. You can download the full white paper here, and browse the entire library at the White Paper section of Syncfusion’s Technology Resource Portal.
Microsoft provides an array of tools for Azure; however, the company also welcomes and actively encourages enhancements made possible by its partners. As a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP), Syncfusion’s job is to provide value-added solutions. At Syncfusion, “value-added” means proven components and frameworks, better developer productivity than is possible natively, ease of use, and unmatched customization capabilities.
For example, Azure HDInsight is a fully-managed cloud Apache Hadoop offering that provides optimized open source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and Microsoft R. To take advantage of it, developers have to sacrifice some conveniences such as the ability to work and deploy applications locally and remotely with equal ease. The Azure HDInsight Platform is built to be a general purpose Apache Hadoop distribution. Syncfusion’s Big Data and Dashboard Platforms are purpose-built to make the data warehousing and Visual Analytics use case as seamless and easy to use as possible.
Point-and-click simplicity. Syncfusion’s Big Data and Dashboard Platforms are one-click simple to deploy on Azure, so developers don’t have to worry about infrastructure details such as virtual machines and their configuration.
Fully customizable. Syncfusion’s Big Data and Dashboard Platforms provide unparalleled customization capabilities so developers have complete, end-to-end control of their application’s big data and dashboarding capabilities, backed by the stability and scalability of Azure. Developers benefit from fine-grain customization capabilities right down to the widget level.
Complete flexibility. Syncfusion’s Big Data and Dashboard Platforms provide greater flexibility than other alternatives. An entire IDE that is purpose-built for working with big data is included with the Syncfusion Big Data Platform. Developers can simply choose to connect with the local cluster on their desktop or an Azure cluster simply by clicking on one of the two options.
Pluggable. Syncfusion’s extension model enables developers to use the custom dashboard components and custom widgets Syncfusion builds in their environments. The widgets behave like platform-native widgets.
Use-specific Configurability. Developers can create customized dashboard platforms that suit a specific-need, whether that’s company-specific, industry-specific, or department-specific. These capabilities are ideal for developers who want greater API-level access than HDInsight provides.
Open APIs. Syncfusion’s Big Data and Dashboard Platforms provide APIs developers can use to easily call and plug into their system. Syncfusion’s dashboarding capabilities can be built into solutions and deployed as part of a custom platform a customer builds. For example, a developer creating a CRM solution can deploy it side-by-side with the custom dashboarding solution she built with Syncfusion’s Dashboard platform, seamlessly, on Azure. Without that capability, developers using another solution such as Power BI have to deploy that and their application separately. While the Power BI reports are the same as they would be otherwise, Power BI does not behave as if it were part of the application, which results in bifurcated user and developer experiences.
When the dashboard and application are deployed together, as Syncfusion’s Dashboard Platform enables, end customers benefit from a seamless, unified experience. It’s as if the application and the dashboard were built together from the ground up.
In addition, Syncfusion end customers do not have to pay licensing or use fees for the dashboard solution. This is a very important aspect as few companies wish to task their customers with additional licensing and payment requirements.
A breakthrough. Today’s developers don’t have the luxury of building applications from scratch. To meet shrinking deadlines, they have to license components or use open source components. What developers haven’t been able to do until now is snap an entire platform into their application, which enables an entirely new level of productivity. What’s more, the application and the platform can share the same back end and use the same authentication services.
Simple, flat-fee licensing. When developers want to deploy their applications to the cloud for scalability, they have to consider the licensing ramifications. Syncfusion’s licensing model is completely “scale-free,” so scale doesn’t matter. Developers can deploy their applications on-premises or in the cloud without the hassle, cost, and potential risks of complicated licensing models. There are no per-user, per-developer, or per-server costs.
Syncfusion is a long-time VSIP and a constant contributor to Microsoft’s vibrant developer ecosystem. We now offer more than 800 controls and frameworks, platforms for big data processing, dashboards, reporting and integration, and a predictive analytics tool.
All of Syncfusion’s public-facing infrastructure has been running on Azure for the past two years, so we understand the native capabilities and limitations of the platform.
Azure provided a great system for dealing with our own growth. It replaced all of the uncertainty and complexity that comes with managing servers and other infrastructure with reliability and simplicity. Now we can provision infrastructure on demand, and if an instance fails, we can spin up another one, avoiding downtime. In addition, storage capacity is never a concern because we have ready access to backup services.
Syncfusion has been one of the leading providers of components for Microsoft platforms since 2001. Today, we offer more controls and frameworks than ever and the tools developers need to harness and drive business value from their data.