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Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner, the podcast where we dive deep into all things Microsoft Dynamics.
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Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey into the world of Dynamics 365, this is your place to gain insights, learn new tricks and understand what a good reporting and analytics tool should be.
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Simple, I'm your co-host, Chris.
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And this is Brad.
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This episode was recorded on September 6th 2024.
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Chris, chris, chris, simple.
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I like simple, me too.
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I like data and I like analysis and I like it to be simple and I also like big news.
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And with us today, we had the opportunity to speak with two longtime friends of the podcast, brian peterson and anthony bonaduce of cosmos, to learn all about cosmos and the new features that they've added to the product welcome welcome we do this.
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We do this routine before this whole thing starts.
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Okay, we do like that.
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You know, when you're uh, when you're a singer, right Like you got to go through that throat exercise.
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So it's just.
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I had a little funny throat exercise this afternoon and just sometimes we just come in and we want to do it.
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Mr.
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Bonaduce, did I say something that you didn't agree with?
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No, can you hear me, okay now.
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I can hear you perfectly fine.
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I did the test, I tested everything.
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Of course, it all worked, your mic's working.
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And then I of course had to go back to old, reliable, my little desktop speaker.
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So there we go.
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It's just like when you're doing a presentation you can spend a month preparing it, walk through it 300 times and then, the one time you have to go, do it live.
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Something always goes wrong.
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Something goes wrong.
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What's up, guys?
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Nothing, nothing Been looking forward to speaking with you.
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I haven't had the opportunity to speak with you on the podcast in a long time, so thank you for taking the time to speak with us this afternoon.
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I'm looking forward to hearing a lot of great things from the two of you.
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I've been seeing a lot of great things from the two of you.
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I've been seeing a lot of great things, and now to have the opportunity to discuss them with you is exciting.
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But before we jump into that and talk about all these great things, do you mind telling everyone a little bit about yourselves and Cosmos?
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We start with Mr Brian this time.
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I think we did you last time, anthony.
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So, brian Peterson, I'm the coo here at cosmos data technologies that's it that's it, anticlimactic I know exactly
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wait, do we need to like let's?
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Let's do the elevator pitch of who you are yeah, have anthony do that.
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That's his job.
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That's funny okay okay, mr.
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Mr bon sir.
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Yeah, I guess I'll start and Brian, you can, you know, take notes here.
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No, my name is Anthony Bonaduce, so I'm I kind of act as our CRO, but I'm one of the founders here at Cosmos.
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I've been in the Microsoft channel for I don't know, 13, 14 years, something like that, but primarily focused on all things reporting and analytics and those kind of hot button items, and so, yeah, it's a little bit about my background.
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Great and Chris informed me yesterday because we were talking about how long we've been in the space and we were talking with someone who's been in the space for 20 years and I've been in it for a lot longer than 20 years.
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You're supposed to say decades, so you've been in the space for 20 years and I've been in it for a lot longer than 20 years, you're supposed to say decades, yeah, so you've been in the channel for a decade and a half yeah, it's like, um, you know it's like when people have a baby and they're not sure.
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When you switch from like months, you know people are like yeah, they're.
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You know my daughter's 38 months.
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You know there's a cutoff somewhere in there but yeah, 164.
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Months.
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I felt like I had two decades before I went there, but I got it.
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Yeah, no, no Under two decades sounds better, right yeah.
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Exactly, oh, just under two decades.
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Yes, yeah, you can say a long time.
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That is a good point, though it's when do you transition?
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I like that.
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When do you transition from, like, having an 18 month old to a year and a half old, or 24 month old, or a two year old?
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Yeah, like when.
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When do you, uh, when do you cut over?
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Yeah, it's tough.
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You didn't know that we were going to talk about that today, did you?
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I mean it's an important topic so I'm sure the community's interested, so that's good.
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I think they're interested in one's take.
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We'll have to throw up a poll.
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One of these days we'll have to do a live podcast and we can throw up polls and everything, but no, thank you for joining us Now, cosmos what is Cosmos?
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What does Cosmos do?
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Yeah, I would let Brian go, but after that performance, I think I'll handle this one.
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So Cosmos, simply put.
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Yeah, I didn't know you were feeling short and sweet today, brian, but simply put, Cosmos is.
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You know the way I describe it to people.
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It's the first and only fully cloud-based reporting and analytics platform that's born in the cloud and then built specifically for Business Central Cloud.
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So, obviously, to answer your question in a succinct manner, brad, I mean it's reporting analytics for Business Central, but I think it's, you know, unique in that it really is kind of the first of its kind.
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There's been a lot of, as we know, household names for reporting and third-party solutions in the Microsoft space, but those were all designed for on-prem, they were built for nav or GP, and when you work in the cloud and you work with Business Central Cloud, it's a real delicate way you have to approach the reporting side to make sure things are performant and you're able to get all the data you need.
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And so you know, we saw that gap, as I mentioned.
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You know, brian and myself have been doing reporting analytics for I don't know 35 years combined or something like that 30, 35 years, over three decades.
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Over three decades, 35 months.
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But you know, we saw that gap in functionality and just thought you know what?
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Someone needs to do something about it, and we're probably the people to do it.
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So so you're born.
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Everyone merely adopted cloud.
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You were born in the cloud.
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Yes, just like Bane.
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I got where you're going with that, by the way.
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Yeah, so that's I mean.
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So that's kind of the gist of it, but obviously there's a whole lot more to it.
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No, it's great and I've seen some great things with Cosmos in the cloud reporting and we did have an opportunity to speak with you in a previous episode a little bit more in detail about that and I'd like to talk about how it works and repeat some of that, but I'm impatient, yeah, and I want to get down to the latest and greatest and what's new with Cosmos.
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Yeah.
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So I mean, if people saw our first episode I know you guys, and congratulations, by the way the podcast has blown up, it seems like and you've had some amazing, you know heavy hitters on here.
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A lot of people were, I like, like I said, I wasn't even sure if we were cool enough to be on the podcast anymore.
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So I'm honored to be here as part of this.
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But, um, yeah, I mean you guys had said, hey, when you have something you know interesting, let us know.
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We'd love to have you back.
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That was shocking, obviously, for you guys to invite us back.
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But what you know, what's exciting that we wanted to get on and obviously talk about is that there's been a huge need in general around reporting functionality, which is where Cosmos was born.
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And as the needs of the channel have matured and moved into a more modern approach to reporting, people need something to get holistic views of data.
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So Cosmos was born for BC.
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But then, you know, we started working with customers and obviously there were needs for third-party data sets.
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Right, we have historical data in NAV.
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We want to bring that along with us, or we have some data that lives in, you know, some payroll system or whatever.
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It is right, external data sets, and there's been a big demand.
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We've been pushing as quick as we could to release this, and so now Cosmos can accommodate those data sets as well alongside the customer's business central data, so they can truly have that holistic, comprehensive single data repository that harnesses and kind of mashes together all of their data across the organization and then obviously expose that comprehensive view into reports, excel-based reports, power BI dashboards, analytical views, whatever you want to do.
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And so that's the really, I think, exciting stuff.
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We announced that last week and it's been busy, we'll put it that way.
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So I know that's validated needs right there, I guess.
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There is a huge need for that.
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But before I get into it, I do want to say you both always have vip access to the podcast so you don't even have to wonder if you're cool enough your og you have that vip card until you don't yeah just remember that you have every card, but it can be revoked yes, no, see you again on monday, anytime you want to, you can just slide right in.
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We make time, just like we did today for you.
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Uh, it's, it's.
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Not many have that status, but the two of you do the.
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That is more significant than it may sound to someone that's listening, because reporting on business center, which is cloud-based application, is it's important and what you had put together is easy and it's almost turnkey right, so somebody can set it up and get it running in a short period of time.
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I won't say the statistics you may have some more information on that.
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But now to bring in other data sources to report alongside of that is significant because Business Central is a fully functional ERP software application that can satisfy a complete business right, all the areas for that business.
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But I work with many businesses that have other separate systems that perform another function or a need that has data and they often struggle with okay, how do we take this data and put this together so that you can report in one, as you had mentioned one place?
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So I think that is such a need for that I had a loss of words there within the space, so that somebody can report off many different systems.
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And, to your point, with space being I don't want to say it's a premium, but this space for Business Central or having data when you're doing a migration from one system to a new system or even an old version of Navision, nav whichever version you want to say, depending on how long you've been working with it to not have to worry about bringing that with you or bringing that forward, but still be able to look at that.
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Historical access is significant.
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Access is significant when doing this, with Cosmos being a cloud-based reporting engine I guess you could call it or reporting system, and now we're talking about bringing third-party data into it.
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Are there any limitations?
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Business Central is cloud-based, so you're pulling off a cloud-based repository.
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Are there any limitations to the data that can be read within Cosmos?
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If it's an on-premise system, do they have to move it to the cloud?
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Can they read it directly from their SQL service sitting in their back room somewhere, or how does that work?
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Yeah, I think, since Brian has been super talkative, I'm going to defer this to you, brian, so you can actually chime in on today's podcast.
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Yeah, of course.
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So there's a few different ways we can pull in data now you know one of them is Excel files.
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We have some folks that have used that.
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If it's not a ton of data and it's something that's static, right, we can just dump everything into Excel from wherever they want, ingest it into Cosmos.
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Nice and easy.
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For folks that have data in like a SQL database or something that's on-premise, all we would ask them to do is just shift it up to Azure SQL.
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That way we can pull it in.
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I mean, with Management Studio nowadays and SQL, you can do a few clicks and it'll just send all the data up.
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So it's not a big lift to do that, and once it's in Azure SQL, we can grab it and it's super fast for us to pull all the information in right.
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A lot of organizations nowadays have more advanced firewalls, so us trying to, you know, find a way to get through their firewall and access to their SQL server from outside.
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Most good IT folks are not going to want to allow that to begin with, and so having everything in Azure SQL makes it, puts it in the cloud and makes it nice and easy for us to get to and easy for the customers to maintain as well.
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So the customer would need someone who's looking to take advantage of this new functionality that's been introduced within Cosmos over the last week, which I can't say enough.
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It is a need for this and I'm happy to see that it's there.
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They would put it in Azure SQL.
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Now, on that Azure SQL.
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Is that?
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See that it's there.
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They would put it in Azure SQL.
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Now, on that Azure SQL.
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Is that something that would be their Azure SQL?
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Like how, again, where would they store that?
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Would they store that with Cosmos?
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Would they store that within their own Azure SQL server?
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That?
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would be within their own Azure SQL.
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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Within their own Azure SQL and then you can link the two together.
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Yep, I have some questions on the data construct or the data sets there.
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But is it intended or could it be someone who may have another system, that's another transactional system?
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Is it intended to be a static database or is it something that if they could update it regularly with transactional data, that that would work for them as well?
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Either.
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Or, as far as we're concerned, if it's static data, we have a little checkbox when they're setting up the configuration to connect to that Azure SQL database.
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It's just called static data and that means it'll pull it in once and then it doesn't need to pull it every single night, since the data is never changing.
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Otherwise, if it is something that's kind of, you know, replicated from a transactional system, then every time that we go and pull the data we'll just pull that fresh data from Azure SQL.
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So it's intended for either one.
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Okay, that's a wonderful feature to have With now.
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There being so, Business Central extensions aside, Business Central is a pretty standard data set.
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We know it's a known data set.
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Now you're talking about bringing in an additional third-party data set in essence for the sake of the conversation.
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How do they map or manage or tell Cosmos this is what the data is that I have?
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Yep, yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit, brian, then I'll let you fill in some of the color on that.
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But yeah, one of the really cool things about our engineering team is they have a lot of experience, a lot right, and so when they build things in the product, they build them with a future thinking view in mind.
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Like if we solve a problem that's immediate, they usually take the opportunity to say what else are we going to need to do?
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Are people going to want our, you know is going to be important down the road, and how can we put the foundation in to solve for that?
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And so this is a good example to your point, brad.
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So inside of Cosmos, basically from day one, there's been a cloud-based ETL platform.
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We call it the Cosmos Data Engine, and what it really is is a way to take data out of a system, whether it's business central or something else immediately see all those tables, all the fields, and then, basically in a point-click interface, be able to say hey, you know, we had our business central data over here.
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Now we have this new system and we just want to check the boxes for these 12 tables or these 20 tables that we want and then within those tables we have, you know, these specific fields that we want for reporting and basically those just get dropped into their existing data set, or a new data set can be created and then you just publish, literally click a publish button and the application actually writes everything behind the scenes.
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So it cleans the data, moves, it builds out all the procedures, everything.
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So you know the way I describe it is like it's a no code ETL platform on the back end and, brian, anything you'd add on that.
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Yeah, no, I mean, that's what I was going to say.
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There's a lot of tooling, for you know, if there are things that are different.
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Like we're working with a customer right now, they're bringing in some legacy data from their previous system, which wasn't nav, it wasn't anything in the dynamic space.
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And you know they said well, our GL account numbers are different though.
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So they already have a mapping file they put together as part of their migration to Business Central.
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But we can bring in their historical data.
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It's really easy for us to just use that mapping file and say, hey, it was this old GL account number in Traverse, which is the system they're using, and the new GL account is now.
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You know this is the one from Business Central, right?
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So by the time that it comes, you know Cosmos can handle all of that easily.
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So when it comes into Business Central, they have all of their old transactions but with their new BC account numbers.
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So everything's pretty seamless from a reporting perspective.
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Okay, so it's designed for quick user adoption, yeah Right, so does this also help?
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Now we're talking about moving legacy data to Cosmos.
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Have this been used for data migration as well, or is it?
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Oh okay, so can you give me an example of how that turned out for them, what the average time it took that client?
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Because that's something that we had a conversation recently, as of yesterday, about what are the different paths of data migration, what are the tools, and so there's so many different tools out there, so it is good to hear that you know Cosmos can do something like that.
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Yeah, yeah, brian, do you want to talk to like what you've seen hooking that up and how it gets married up and the level of complexity and kind of all that stuff?
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Yeah, exactly Well, and it's one of those things where I mean, as far as the data migration is concerned, we talk to, you know, we'll talk to customers that are in the process of moving from, say, like we talked to someone recently who's on an older on-prem NAV 2016 system, they're in the process of moving to Business Central and one of the concerns that they have is, well, what a lot of reports that you know that go back, you know, several years to do kind of year over year comparisons for, like you know, item sales by customer, things like that, and so you know, and they'd received a somewhat hefty estimate to move all of that transactional data directly into Business Central, and the thing is they don't even really care if it's in Business Central, they just want to report on right.
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So, as part of this, you know, moving all of this data into Cosmos, right, we can just easily get the information out of the old system, like I mentioned, either a direct connection to the SQL database we can do any of the data cleansing or mapping if needed and then, when they just run a report in Cosmos even though let's say that they just went live January 1st of this year they can run a year over year comparison of this, you know, this August versus last August, and everything just works.
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The users don't know, or, honestly, really even care, that the data is from the old system.
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They just want to know what were the numbers last year and what are the numbers this year.
00:19:24.719 --> 00:19:33.442
And are, you know, things up and down, up or down for this customer right and it's like, like, like I mentioned, it's a very, it's a very fast and easy process on our side.
00:19:33.442 --> 00:19:39.731
It's not a heavy, you know, it's not what I consider like a large services engagement or anything like that.
00:19:39.731 --> 00:19:44.443
Usually a couple hours and everything's done, imported and ready to go.
00:19:50.390 --> 00:19:53.057
Yeah, I think a lot of what we've been focusing on because, to your point, chris, like there are other solutions out there, right.
00:19:53.057 --> 00:19:57.374
So it has to not just do what those things do, it has to, like, provide more value, right.
00:19:57.374 --> 00:20:07.019
And where we've really been focusing on is just, you know, cutting costs and effort, reducing, like you know, the time it takes, all those questions you're probably asking about for that exact reason.
00:20:07.019 --> 00:20:16.625
But, like it's, it's the same thing with the data modeling, like to Brian's point, you can bring it into BC in theory, unless it's some insane volume of data, but you can bring it into BC.
00:20:16.625 --> 00:20:18.811
But it's going to have a hefty price tag.
00:20:18.852 --> 00:20:27.365
And I've talked to so many partners that are like we hate doing that, like it's the worst part of the deployments is dealing with the historical data migration, right.
00:20:27.450 --> 00:20:32.674
So you know, okay, let's make that easier, let's make that cheaper, let's make that faster, let's make it repeatable.
00:20:32.674 --> 00:20:52.337
And it's kind of the same idea on, like, the reporting side of the platform, right, like people can kind of get the data they want, they would want in the cosmos report currently, I suppose, not always, but, like you know, brian and I always talk about, like this one customer that we just always kind of felt horrible for and luckily we solved their problems.
00:20:52.337 --> 00:20:57.759
But like you know, they just wanted to get this one report and it just took them 47 steps.
00:20:57.759 --> 00:21:00.051
And when I say that like that's not an exaggeration.
00:21:00.051 --> 00:21:05.423
They had a word document, a Word document that every time they needed the report there was 47 steps.
00:21:05.423 --> 00:21:09.862
So it was like okay, export this, run it for these companies, export each one individually.
00:21:09.862 --> 00:21:14.060
Those go in a file, take that file, use the mapping file, reference all that.
00:21:14.060 --> 00:21:14.561
You know what I mean.
00:21:14.561 --> 00:21:15.846
Like so can you do it.
00:21:16.491 --> 00:21:17.496
Can it be done better?
00:21:18.632 --> 00:21:22.061
Like that's what we try and solve for here right at Cosmos.
00:21:25.029 --> 00:21:55.135
Yeah, I think people forget, when you're looking at some of those reporting tools or even in the process of implementing Business Central, is that the last thing you really care for is all the tedious work that you'd have to do just to bring historical data, be able to report on legacy information, and so it sounds like you've really built this amazing product that allows that to be easier, or make it easy, not only from a client's perspective, but also from a partner's perspective.
00:21:55.135 --> 00:22:09.064
Right, because sometimes you don't have the, maybe the skillset within your staff that can do all of that, and you got to figure it out when set within your staff that can do all of that, and you got to figure it out when, hey, I can just reach out to Anthony and Brian and say, hey, can you help us with this one?
00:22:09.746 --> 00:22:12.394
Yeah, it's important to remember.
00:22:12.394 --> 00:22:44.717
I think with this you hit on a couple of points, because bringing the data forward can be a costly event as part of an implementation, not only for the time it takes to take the data and put it into a specific box and try to map it and put it together or you can create an extension to store it and then you're still going to have to report on it but there's also a cost for the storage, for the business central access as well, which I think often gets overlooked, and a lot of times I hear the same questions we just want to bring it forward, we just need the information.
00:22:44.717 --> 00:22:45.080
So it's important.
00:22:45.080 --> 00:22:45.789
Yes, there are many tools available.
00:22:45.789 --> 00:22:48.839
I think there are many tools available for everything in this world.
00:22:48.839 --> 00:22:50.135
There's not only going to be one option.
00:22:50.135 --> 00:22:52.519
It's to make sure you have the option that's best for you.
00:22:53.289 --> 00:23:05.726
In a case like this, it's important for someone to say, hey, there are tools such as Cosmos or something where, okay, if you're just looking to report on the data, you don't have to have it within Business Central any longer.
00:23:05.726 --> 00:23:10.696
Now we can report on the data from a separate system that we can upload the information into.
00:23:10.696 --> 00:23:21.390
It will be your footprint and then we'll just map it, using the wonderful tools to put it together, to have one homogeneous view of your data and, like you had mentioned, brian, nobody will be the wiser of it.
00:23:21.390 --> 00:23:30.263
One homogeneous view of your data and, like you had mentioned, brian, nobody will be the wiser of it With the use of this and, I think, with Cosmos in general.
00:23:30.263 --> 00:23:33.849
So now you have the features and the functionality that you built into it.
00:23:34.852 --> 00:23:39.325
One question will be okay, it sounds great, it sounds wonderful, but how do I pay for it?
00:23:39.325 --> 00:23:40.069
How is it licensed?
00:23:40.069 --> 00:23:42.558
Is it licensed by the data volume?
00:23:42.558 --> 00:23:46.500
Is it licensed by the number of users licensed, by the number of tables licensed, by the number of reports?
00:23:46.500 --> 00:23:54.884
For this additional feature, what can a customer expect to have added to their implementation or their cost of the application?
00:23:55.630 --> 00:24:00.179
Yeah, like everything, we try to make it simple and you brought up a good point earlier, brad.
00:24:00.179 --> 00:24:02.289
Like benefits to partners and customers.
00:24:02.289 --> 00:24:04.858
We try to keep both of those in mind, right?
00:24:04.858 --> 00:24:09.932
So I can tell you, having worked on the partner side, there's nothing more obnoxious than when an ISV is.
00:24:09.932 --> 00:24:15.352
Pricing is like you need a secret decoder, ring Right, and there's like 200 line items and there's the if.
00:24:15.532 --> 00:24:19.122
If you check this, add this, like there's a connector charge.
00:24:19.122 --> 00:24:20.715
So we do it by data source.