<p>AI has been the raging buzzword globally and across industries over the past few years. Whilst many have yet to take that bold leap, many others have tried, paused, become disillusioned, and only a few have managed to cross that chasm. </p>
<p>“Where exactly am I in that cycle? What have others who have succeeded done? What do I need to make this a successful conquest? Where do I go next?” These questions arise in every board room and meeting we’ve had with large and small enterprises in their quest to transform and optimize their business. </p>
<p>This year, Hive Ventures decided to answer these questions, by embarking on a nationwide survey, to help business decision-makers and solutions providers alike, unveil the mystery behind the current state of enterprise AI adoption in Taiwan. </p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m6_Sq19EdZs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<p>Get your Free copy today! 👉 <a href="https://www.hiveventures.io/sotea">https://www.hiveventures.io/sotea</a></p>
<h3 id="canner-enterprise---data-access-solution-for-enterprises">Canner Enterprise - Data Access Solution for Enterprises.</h3>
<ul>
<li>【三立新聞】不只半導體領先！台灣企業部署AI人才　成亞洲領頭羊
<a href="https://www.setn.com/News.aspx?NewsID=915381">https://www.setn.com/News.aspx?NewsID=915381</a></li>
<li>【電子時報】蜂行資本：台灣AI應用面3年內有望趕上美國
<a href="https://www.digitimes.com.tw/iot/article.asp?cat=158&amp;cat1=20&amp;cat2=10&amp;id=0000606781_FBD863R37X5P712OQHIPL">https://www.digitimes.com.tw/iot/article.asp?cat=158&amp;cat1=20&amp;cat2=10&amp;id=0000606781_FBD863R37X5P712OQHIPL</a></li>
<li>【聯合報】台灣八成企業積極導入AI 但門檻是「缺有經驗人才」
<a href="https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/5341905">https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/5341905</a></li>
<li>【數位時代】8成台灣企業已經導入AI，一張圖看懂進度到哪裡！還面臨了哪些挑戰？
<a href="https://www.bnext.com.tw/article/61947/tw-ai-trend-2021">https://www.bnext.com.tw/article/61947/tw-ai-trend-2021</a></li>
<li>【中時】台灣已有八成以上企業嘗試導入AI 企業渴望挖掘有經驗人才
<a href="https://turnnewsapp.com/ct-featured/223860.html">https://turnnewsapp.com/ct-featured/223860.html</a></li>
<li>【自由時報】調查：8成企業嘗試導入AI 台美AI應用差距3年內有望追近
<a href="https://ec.ltn.com.tw/article/breakingnews/3478649?utm_medium=APP&amp;utm_campaign=SHARE&amp;utm_medium=APP">https://ec.ltn.com.tw/article/breakingnews/3478649?utm_medium=APP&amp;utm_campaign=SHARE&amp;utm_medium=APP</a></li>
</ul>
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This year, Hive Ventures decided to answer these questions, by embarking on a nationwide survey, to help business decision-makers and solutions providers alike, unveil the mystery behind the current state of enterprise AI adoption in Taiwan.

State of Taiwan Enterprise AI

<p>Nowadays, enterprise data is very complex siloed, and scattered across many different data sources and systems. Being able to retrieve and collecting the holistic data overview is becoming a huge task.  Companies need to have a new approach to solve and apply to their data ecosystem, that is “Data Fabric”.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-a-data-fabric">What is a Data Fabric?</h2>
<p>Conceptually, Data Fabric is an abstraction layer across all the data sources, to empower data teams to collect data information across different sources.  Data Fabric is a distributed data environment that connects all data together so that it can be seamlessly accessed by data management services and utilized by end-users, or by applications, and more importantly, data is not physically moved, it is connected by a virtual layer.</p>
<p>Here’s the Data Fabric definition from Gartner.</p>
<p> <img src="/static/images/ws-post/2021_05_22_intro_data_fabric/gartner.png" alt="Gartner report - Data Fabric Architecture"></p>
<p>Source From <a href="https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/data-fabric-architecture-is-key-to-modernizing-data-management-and-integration/">Gartner Data Fabric Architecture is Key to Modernizing Data Management and Integration</a></p>
<h2 id="key-features">Key features</h2>
<ul>
<li><p><em><strong><strong>Seamlessly integrated with your existing data architecture.</strong></strong></em></p>
<p>The Data Fabric must capable of integrating existing data architecture and data sources, by simply connect to the sources. Data sources may be public clouds or on-premises, Data Fabric technology needs to provide a single layer for data access and delivery, this way data silos can be connected through a virtual layer.</p>
</li>
<li><p><em><strong><strong>Robust data outputs and destinations</strong></strong></em></p>
<p>Through the Data Fabric complex data transformation and optimization, end-users are able to connect to different outputs such as AI, BI, and analytics software.</p>
</li>
<li><p><em><strong><strong>Metadata catalog and management</strong></strong></em></p>
<p>In Data Fabric software one of the most important features is metadata catalog, which allows data to be searchable, downloadable and all business users can easily access and share between different units and departments.</p>
</li>
<li><p><em><strong><strong>Flexible data modeling and transformation</strong></strong></em></p>
<p>Using Data Fabric it is also very easy for users to model and transform their data into different dimensions, so different business users are able to inspect and review the data in different aspects and scenarios.</p>
</li>
<li><p><em><strong><strong>Data sharing &amp; protection</strong></strong></em></p>
<p>Data sharing within an organization and the cross-functional departments is a huge challenge, most enterprises will encounter huge data management bottlenecks while they are scaling their data pipelines.  Also, data protection between each user will need a fine-granular permission layer (schema, table, column-level of access control), a built-in user/role-based permission system, and versioning.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="canner">Canner</h2>
<p>With Canner data access solution, enterprises can connect data silos virtually, and accelerate business data analysis, while ensure data privacy, with data policies.</p>
<ul>
<li>Connect with data sources in clicks.</li>
<li>Optimization for data outputs</li>
<li>Metadata management</li>
<li>Data transformation</li>
<li>Virtual data mart for data sharing &amp; protection.</li>
</ul>


In this article, we would like to introduce a new approach to your business called "Data Fabric"...

Introduction to Data Fabric

<h2 id="interview-with-digitimes">Interview with Digitimes</h2>
<p>In 2011, the World Economic Forum (WEF) pointed out in its Global Risk Report that data was going to become the most valuable resource of the 21st century. According to a report from the International Data Corporation (IDC), global data volume is projected to grow to 163 ZB in 2025, showing a tenfold increase from the 16.1 ZB in 2016. The massive amount of data in combination with the rise of big data and data surveying tools mean that uncovering business opportunities from enormous data has already become an essential task for businesses looking to increase their competitiveness. Consequently, this has drawn great focus to data access, otherwise known as data management platforms. </p>
<p>In response to increasing enterprise demand for big data access, many software companies have begun to offer solutions targeting this market, with the most notable among them being the Taiwanese data company Canner Inc. The company was founded in 2016 with an initial focus on developing content management systems but was able to secure investment from the National Development Fund, Hive Ventures, and SparkLabs Taipei in 2018 to develop its Canner Data Access Solution, which was created in response to growing enterprise data surveying demand. The solution currently targets three industries – finance, manufacturing, and retail. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the solution can also compete with foreign options in terms of both price and time by offering much more competitive pricing and allowing projects to be completed within a span of days.</p>
<h2 id="quick-installation-affordable-pricing-and-support-for-multiple-deployment-modes-and-data-connection-sources">Quick Installation, Affordable Pricing, and Support for Multiple Deployment Modes and Data Connection Sources</h2>
<p>Unlike other solutions, Canner only requires a few minutes to install and can easily adapt to various database types, file formats, and cloud/local limitations. The solution can quickly integrate data from different databases and connect isolated data lakes to integrate, convert, synergize, and extricate the truly valuable parts from a sea of data, effectively increasing business competitiveness. Considering the rapid growth of data nowadays, the software also has automated optimization and extensible computation to bypass the lack of relevant manpower in certain businesses, so that even medium-sized businesses can construct their own data platform.</p>
<p>Howard noted that Canner is not only capable of quickly connecting various databases and data stores, but can also be linked to business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) software as well as various data applications to ease program development efforts. Additionally, database administrators can assign necessary access rights based on the jobs and needs of staff in various departments so that every staff member will always have access to data they need, thereby creating the greatest value from data.</p>
<p>Take manufacturing for example, Canner can help businesses rapidly integrate factory information, M&amp;A data, logistic data, and information from both upstream and downstream partners to shorten the time it takes for the product to arrive on the market. For marketing purposes, the solution can be applied to cross-screen, cross-platform, OMO, and O2O data integration. It is worth mentioning that Canner offers flexible installation options to allow businesses to deploy the software in a designated environment according to their preferences and needs. Canner Cloud in particular can be installed within the private cloud of a business to prevent potential data leaks and thereby meet information security and operation demands.</p>
<h2 id="mentorship-from-tta-partner-accelerator-program-helps-accelerate-product-development-cycle">Mentorship from TTA Partner Accelerator Program Helps Accelerate Product Development Cycle</h2>
<p>Since Canner Inc. entered the data access market in 2018, the technical prowess of the company has been repeatedly tested and reaffirmed. The Canner virtual Data Access Solution has also gained presence in various industries and increasing renown in Taiwan. This is not only the result of hard work from the team behind the software, but also has a lot to do with capital and technical assistance from the National Development Fund, Hive Ventures, and SparkLabs Taipei. </p>
<p>Howard indicated that one of the key reasons that Canner Inc. products were able to hit the market so quickly is because of assistance from SparkLabs Taipei, an international accelerator program introduced to Taiwan by Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA). The program offers mentorship and advice to help him and his team reduce learning time and overcome challenges. Howard believes that Taiwan is in an excellent position to develop its information technology industry. Canner Inc. will continue to invest in this industry to provide the best virtual data center solution for global businesses. </p>
<hr>


Digitimes Interview with our co-founders - We are honored to be invited to share our B2B enterprise experience with Digitimes.

【TTA Magazine】Data Access Solution for Enterprises

<p>Canner, a Taiwan-based data access solution provider, announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $3.5 million in a Series Pre-A funding round.</p>
<p>Led by Taiwania Capital, the funding round was also participated in by global venture capital firm Hive Ventures and SparkLabs Taipei, Canner said in a statement.</p>
<p>Canner will use this funding to accelerate product development, expand local and international marketing efforts, and grow its internal teams.</p>
<p>Founded in 2018, Canner aims to empower businesses to efficiently convert data into business value by connecting data silos and transforming business-facing datasets into application-ready dataset APIs with a universal data access interface. With Canner’s data access technology, users can work with datasets without moving or duplicating data between data sources, simplifying the process of building next-generation data applications on top of cloud data warehouses through a universal layer for APIs, access control, data literacy and optimization from diverse data silos.</p>
<p>“Enterprises used to struggle with data silo issues. Even though most data are now centralized in a data warehouse, balancing business innovation and data security remains a big hurdle for organizations due to the complexity and sensitivity around working with data. That is where Canner comes in,</p>
<p>“With Canner’s data access technology, enterprises can virtually enhance their connectivity to data silos and guarantee data security and privacy when collaborating datasets between business units within a company,” said Howard Chi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Canner.</p>
<p>Canner’s data access solution can be quickly installed in any cloud – public, private, hybrid and otherwise. It provides multi-format output optimization for data applications, as well as multi-layer data access control and authorization. This allows it to empower organizations to self-serve datasets, achieve data democratization and accelerate innovation, thereby greatly improving enterprise data-driven efficiency.</p>
<p>“The limitations in data availability and accessibility at scale are significant obstacles to enterprise digital transformation. Taiwania believes in Canner’s vision to democratize the emerging data access ecosystem by embracing open-source framework that promises to seamlessly integrate next generation business intelligence applications with analytic tools,” said Cheng Wu, General Partner at Taiwania Capital. An industry veteran, Cheng Wu has founded several high-profile companies with total market value of $6 billion and have led several successful exits.</p>
<p>With its existing support for private and mainstream cloud vendors such as AWS, GCP and Azure, Canner plans to expand beyond its robust local customer base in Taiwan by embracing open-source frameworks and providing Canner cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services that are available to global customers.</p>
<p>This year, the company also aims to partner with global cloud data warehouse providers such as Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery, as well as major solution integrator partners, to accelerate cloud data warehouse and data lake usages across organizations.</p>
<p>“We previously invested in Canner’s seed funding round in 2019 and our participation in this round signifies our continued confidence in their business model. There is no question that data will be the building blocks of future enterprise success, and it is critical that businesses find more efficient ways to access and analyze their insights to enable more agile business transformation. With successful entrepreneurs like Cheng Wu now on the Board of Advisors, we look forward to seeing Canner lead the charge in the data solutions space,” said Yan Lee, Founding Partner of Hive Ventures.</p>


Led by Taiwania Capital, the funding round was also participated in by global venture capital firm Hive Ventures and SparkLabs Taipei.

Canner raises $3.5M Series Pre-A funding led by Taiwania Capital

<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>The growth of data innovation has exploded in recent years, mainly due to the thriving cloud data warehouse communities such as Snowflake, Redshift, and BigQuery, with their primary focus on SQL users and business intelligence use cases. Lakehouse architecture brings analytics closer to data lakes, enabling heterogeneous and distributed data processing engines to ingest sources, including diverse workloads such as data science, machine learning capabilities, and near real-time analytics enablement. It has also spawned thriving innovations in integrated data services that automate and unify data modeling, transformation, and metrics, such as dbt and LookML. Collectively, these tools lay the foundation upon which next-generation operational and analytical data applications can be constructed for various data consumers of different personas.</p>
<h2 id="the-data-access-challenges">The Data Access Challenges</h2>
<p>First of all, let&#39;s look at the ultimate goal for data access in a company:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Allow data consumers to find and access their data, fast and simple.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Let&#39;s look at a company&#39;s current data access workflow; here&#39;s what it looks like for a data consumer requesting and accessing data.</p>
<ol>
<li>Data consumers need to find who owns the data.</li>
<li>Request access from the data owners; then, they must filter or mask certain rows and columns to specific groups or users before exposing them to usage.</li>
<li>Based on different data applications/tools, such as using Excel, BI, AI, or RESTful API, data owners need to evaluate the best data access method.</li>
<li>Last is automation. Periodically, update and deliver to end applications and ensure they are secure and auditable.</li>
</ol>
<p>Data access in an enterprise encounters several challenges.</p>
<p><img src="/static/images/ws-post/2022_06_27_enterprise_vision/without-canner-en.png" alt="Without Canner"></p>
<p>From left to right, the data heterogeneity needs to homogenize in the metadata and logical level; data authorization is a sophisticated access control and authorization for domain-specific datasets and their associated data applications; empower datasets with semantic meanings through the process of data productization; Finally, based on different data consumers&#39; persona provide endpoints.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A complete data access layer must solve data heterogeneity, usability, and authorization while enabling consistency and scalability across different data applications.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="the-data-access-layer">The Data Access Layer</h2>
<p>As a company grows, it starts to pile up with hundreds and thousands of requests from data consumers, and the backlogs of demands will need days and even weeks to resolve.</p>
<p>The bottleneck is obvious: the <em><strong>&quot;data access workflow&quot;</strong></em>. We need a data access layer that is a secure, efficient, automated, and intelligent way for data consumers to access data themselves, avoid delays and misalignment, and data owners can authorize. Audit datasets make sure the right person accesses the suitable dataset.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We need a data access layer that is secure, efficient, and intelligent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ultimately, achieve equilibrium between <em><strong>data, people, and applications</strong></em>.</p>
<img alt="balance" src="/static/images/ws-post/2022_06_27_enterprise_vision/balance-en.png"/>

<h2 id="four-core-design-principles">Four-core design principles</h2>
<p>Data Access Layer consists of four core design principles.</p>
<h3 id="1-data-virtualization">1. Data Virtualization</h3>
<p>Data Access Layer is collaborative and distributed in nature, with each silo or data source independently scalable or together as an aggregate.</p>
<h3 id="2-data-productization">2. Data Productization</h3>
<p>Transform data models to domain-oriented datasets; Domain-oriented datasets owned by data owners can be shared and governed by open APIs, with the flexibility of interchangeable metadata and access rules, let data speak your business language.</p>
<h3 id="3-data-authorization">3. Data Authorization</h3>
<p>Consistent data authorization framework from sources to data applications and integrated with existing Identity and Access Management (IAM). Make data authorization consistent across data sources, IAM, and data applications.</p>
<h3 id="4-data-consumption">4. Data Consumption</h3>
<p>Data consumers can generate Queries and APIs with intent and contextual settings, applied to the corresponding datasets via intent declaration, and deliver them to target consumers where final analytics are performed and displayed.</p>
<p><img src="/static/images/ws-post/2022_06_27_enterprise_vision/next-data.png" alt="Canner structure"></p>
<h2 id="the-result">The Result</h2>
<p>Enterprises can significantly eliminate data complexity, communication, and productivity through the data access layer.</p>
<ol>
<li><em><strong>Data access from days to minutes:</strong></em> Reduce 60% of data integration cost with up-to-date data delivery.</li>
<li><em><strong>Reduce duplicate datasets:</strong></em> Create masked and filtered datasets without physically moving data.</li>
<li><em><strong>Achieve self-service analytics:</strong></em> Improve data productivity across analytical and operational data applications and tools.</li>
</ol>


The vision of Canner Enterprise - Data Access Layer of the Modern Data Stack.