Adastra is a digital, data, analytics, and AI partner to leading companies around the globe. Together with its sister company, Ataccama, it enables customers’ transition from their current, traditional business models to more modernized approaches. The result is data-driven decision-making that influences a proliferating data culture with data democratization, enabling the use of data, analytics, and AI in all business processes.

The company’s mission is to help its customers succeed by understanding, managing, controlling, and improving all the data that connects them to their customers, and their customers to the world. Navigating, with Adastra’s guidance, the complexities of cloud modernization, customers discover the right opportunities and capabilities that digital transformation offers to achieve differentiated value.

On the modern digitization journey

Data and analytics are at the core of Adastra’s DNA. The company started as a data and analytics organization and, for more than 20 years, has helped customers adopt stronger data governance and analytics capabilities using the bleeding edge technologies of the day.

“Organizations had massive volumes of data even back when we started,” said Zeeshan Saeed, SVP and Microsoft Lead at Adastra. “But the systems were not able to handle the data to make it pervasive so that it could be used across critical processes for deep business intelligence. With the cloud plus modern analytics and AI, computing capacity is no longer a limiting factor. Organizations now have many more magnitudes of insight into their data available to them.”

Utilizing its legacy foundation and strength in data to connect all aspects of digitization, Adastra has expanded its offerings to help customers with their complete digital modernization journey. The company has well-established specializations in areas including data governance, cloud assessment and onboarding, application modernization, and web and mobile application development. It is also frequently called upon by customers for creative and design work and for implementations of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Ataccama, the company’s own master data management and data governance platform, is recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It’s breadth of experience allows the company to address the entire modern digital estate—with data, analytics, and AI still central to supporting customers’ transformation journey.

The future is analytics and AI

A Microsoft partner for more than 12 years, with gold competencies in the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, and 2020 Microsoft Commercial Impact Award winner for the second consecutive year, Adastra has seen the depth and breadth of this partnership expand significantly in the last four years. “As Adastra’s partnership and strategic alignment with Microsoft deepens, the diversity of our styles and strengths, along with our common focus on customer innovation all play key roles in our mutual success,” said Darren Edery, CEO, Adastra. And as advanced analytics and AI have become accessible to practically every organization through the cloud, the opportunities to enable a cost-effective digital data estate with analytics and AI have multiplied dramatically.

The Microsoft desire to scale across thousands of organizations where capabilities in analytics and AI can be leveraged and applied perfectly coincided with Adastra’s strategic goal to deliver these capabilities to its customers. “We saw the future and that analytics and AI is best way of unlocking business value,” said Kevin Harmer, Managing Director and Lead Cloud Architect at Adastra. “There was a nice synergy with Microsoft where our global organization could deliver at scale for many Microsoft customers making the strategic move to the Microsoft Azure cloud.”

Adastra’s own global customer base was ready to migrate to Microsoft Azure—and Adastra, knowing that Microsoft technology could meet its customers’ needs, was eager to lead the way.

An excellent example of this is the way Adastra is leading the partner ecosystem with Azure Synapse. Adastra has collaborated with Microsoft to guide development of the Azure Synapse platform through product team engagement and early adopter enablement, demonstrating differentiating value across multiple industries. Today, Adastra is the premier Azure Synapse partner in Canada.

As Microsoft embraced data as “the new electricity,” in Satya Nadella’s words, there developed perfect alignment with Adastra’s excellence in operationalizing data for business benefits and to drive value, generating new data insights that were previously impossible to achieve.

“Adastra is emerging as a strong data, analytics and AI partner with proven capabilities to enable customers’ digital transformation with a strong governance approach,” said Simran Sachar, Analytics and AI Director, Microsoft One Commercial Partner. “With our deeper partnership we are helping our customers accelerate digital transformation journey through data, analytics and AI-driven enterprise solutions.”

Transforming businesses across industries

Adastra delivers value to customers through its knowledge, agility, robustness, and speed-to-market. Examples of this include:

A large governmental agency responsible for all modes of transportation in its region relied on Adastra to modernize its business intelligence strategy and transform data into actionable information. Through its solutions, facilitation of advanced analytics and AI, implementation of a modern data governance framework, and training, Adastra helped the customer achieve its future vision and make giant strides in delivering operational excellence while also increasing service provider confidence and transit rider satisfaction.

Adastra also helped a major energy industry customer establish a modern platform for enterprise data provisioning and analytics, and, by implementing Azure Synapse Analytics, unlocked dataflow to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Adastra’s solution connected 25 sources of data and decreased the time to integrate new data by 83 percent while adhering to strict regulatory compliance. With a new unified data-as-a-service environment, the customer can now facilitate complex reporting and access event-based services in its environment as it advances in its digital transformation.

Ensuring data quality for the future

Looking ahead, Adastra sees the growing use of analytics and AI unlocking critical challenges around data quality. Through advanced data governance, organizations can regulate their data to ensure the delivery of accurate and timely information and insights, execute strategic decision-making, and accelerate development of products and services.

“I’m genuinely impressed not only by Microsoft’s industry-leading and customer-centric tech stack, but also by the integrity of the Microsoft team,” said Edery. “They are committed to the partner ecosystem and they back it up with their actions every day. We’re excited about continuing to mature our partnership, broadening our capabilities and geographic reach, and driving Microsoft Azure growth, together.”

In partnership with Microsoft, Adastra and its sister company, Ataccama, are now helping customers fight COVID-19 by offering a Data Governance Acceleration Program— implementing AI-driven data governance powered by Microsoft Azure—at no cost to customer organizations.