Why Data Connectivity Is Now a Competitive Requirement

Every product-led independent software vendor (ISV) deal comes with the same question: 'Does it connect to our data?' Whether it's Snowflake, MongoDB, Salesforce, or that legacy Oracle instance nobody wants to touch, your customers expect seamless connectivity to tools they use every day like Power BI, Tableau, and Excel.

For product leaders at ISVs, your customers expect your platform to connect to their data wherever it lives. But every quarter you spend building connectors is a quarter your competitors spend shipping features. You need connectivity that works at enterprise scale, without treating it like a core engineering investment. For REST ISVs, reliable data connectivity is foundational, since your product’s value depends on securely accessing and serving customer data through APIs at scale.

Three Paths for ISVs

When your platform needs to connect to 50+ databases and APIs, these are three common options:

Build it yourself. Hire connectivity engineers. Maintain drivers every time source systems update. Field support tickets that have nothing to do with your actual product. Watch your roadmap slip while competitors ship.

Cobble together open-source drivers. Deal with inconsistent quality across connectors with drivers built by committee. Explain to customers why the MongoDB integration works differently than Salesforce. Hope someone's still maintaining that driver when the source system pushes a breaking change.

Embed proven connectivity. Ship faster with drivers built by the team that created the ODBC standard—the same connectivity Google, Microsoft, and Snowflake chose for their own platforms.

What Your Customers Need

When a data engineer needs to connect MongoDB to Tableau for an executive dashboard, they're not looking for possibilities, they're looking for reliability. For example, when the source system updates, it’s crucial that their driver continues to work reliably. When ETL pipelines take weeks to build, the last thing your development team needs are brittle pipelines breaking on schema changes, drivers lagging source updates, or performance issues from missing pushdown.

When seeking out drivers, here are details to search for:

• Drivers that suit users’ needs with rapid source-version support, regression testing, documented compatibility, or update SLAs

• Pushdown query optimization for filters and aggregations processed at the source for speed

• Enterprise security built in including OAuth 2.0, SSO, LDAP, Kerberos

• Real-time access to live data without ETL complexity

• Schema mapping that convert complex data structures into clean, queryable tables automatically

When a data engineer evaluates your platform, it’s essential to connect to user data with:

• Pushdown query optimization so filters and aggregations process at the source for speed

• Enterprise security baked in with OAuth 2.0, SSO, LDAP, Kerberos

• Real-time access to live data without forcing them to build ETL pipelines

• Schema mapping that converts complex data structures into clean, queryable tables

Selective Excellence Over Checkbox Coverage

Developers can quickly build an ODBC driver, but enterprise users need connectivity that works at petabyte scale without breaking. And while competitors race to 350+ drivers with thin support, Simba from insightsoftware delivers white-glove data connectivity through approximately 60 meticulously maintained drivers, backed by decades of experience and the team that created the ODBC standard.

By embedding Simba, you're offering your customers the same connectivity technology that industry titans like Google and Microsoft chose for theirs. Simba provides a direct line to the engineering standard these platforms trust in production. With Simba, your customers get drivers built to the same quality bar that powers petabyte-scale deployments, backed by the team that's maintained enterprise data connectivity for over 30 years.

Ready to learn more? Read our Build vs Buy: The Data Connectivity Decision Framework whitepaper today.