CData Expands Data Connectivity Options For AI Developers

The Data integration technology developer now offers a free Connect AI Developer Edition, along with other tools, that programmers and development teams can use to more effectively link AI applications and agents to enterprise data sources.

CData wants to bring development teams deeper into the AI connectivity picture.

As AI applications and agents proliferate, they need to connect to an expanding range of data sources to do their job. CData has been filling that need with its Connect AI data connectivity and integration platform that serves the needs of centralized IT management and functional business users of AI systems.

Now CData is looking to boost its connectivity offerings for development teams that build AI applications and agents that use enterprise data. The company now offers Connect AI Developer Edition, a free platform that provides AI agents and coding tools with secure, live Model Context Protocol (MCP) access to hundreds of data sources.

CData also recently debuted CData Connect AI Python SDK and CData CLI, which further expand software developers’ ability to build apps and agents that have direct access to enterprise systems including Salesforce, Snowflake, Workday, NetSuite, Microsoft 365 and hundreds of others.

Earlier this month CData also extended Connect AI to provide a governed AI data layer for HIPAA-regulated environments, enabling healthcare providers, payers, life sciences organizations and healthcare technology companies to securely connect AI applications and agents to protected health information.

“I think that CData is taking really good steps—correct steps—in expanding their horizon about AI and AI-enabled tools,” said Chaitanya Joshi, senior data architect and team lead with InterWorks, a global provider of data and analytics consulting services that partners with CData.

InterWorks, based in Chapel Hill, N.C., has worked with CData for several years and leverages its flagship CData Connect AI (previously CData Connect Cloud) platform that accesses, replicates and integrates data from hundreds of disparate sources. InterWorks incorporates the CData platform into customer projects, where appropriate, and collaborates with the vendor during the deal registration, product evaluation and implementation stages.

Joshi said CData has been adapting the Connect AI platform to meet the need for AI systems to access disparate data sources. “I found that they really understood the use cases, really understood how a data integration product should fit within the AI world and AI scenarios,” he said.

CData Connect AI provides connectivity (including universal connectivity and replication capabilities), data semantic context, and data control (including observability and governance).

While the focus for Connect AI has traditionally been on IT management and business users, the new Connect AI Developer Edition is designed to create a “developer-centric path” that allows programmers to leverage the platform as they work on enterprise AI deployment projects, CData executives said during a briefing with CRN.

“AI is changing the way that enterprises build things, it changes enterprise development,” said Jerod Johnson, CData director of technology evangelism, in the briefing.

He pointed to a recent Gartner study that found that while 90 percent of enterprise software engineers will be using coding assistants by 2028, 53 percent of all organizations still rely on customer-built APIs, connectors and pipelines to deliver data context to the AI models that power internal and customer-facing applications.

Wiring agents to enterprise data can be dicey: Agents may be “over-permissioned” and use data they should not have access to, or they may issue corrupted or incomplete results due to API drift, schema changes or other factors.

New Products’ Details

The new Connect AI Developer Edition is a free platform, sized for individual developers and small teams, limited to five users and five sources, and 500 tool calls per month. It provides MCP-based access to every Connect AI source connector and exposes enterprise APIs as a consistent, queryable data layer with standardized schema, read/write support, and automatic handling of authentication, rate limits, versioning and pagination.

The software includes a management MCP server, MCP server support, per-user authentication passthrough, and query logging with user-level attribution. CData says the software works out of the box with any MCP-capable coding assistant, client or framework, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and LangChain, among others.

Connect AI also ships with a Data Copilot, a Connect Gateway, and toolkits that allow development teams to package governed data access into a single MCP Server URL for specific use cases and restrict AI agents to only the data they need.

CData is also offering Connect AI Python SDK, which provides DB-API-compliant access to Connect AI and allows developers to pull governed enterprise data into Python workflows. The toolset is open sourced under the MIT license.

And CData CLI is a new command-line interface for CData’s JDBC, ODBC, Python and ADO.NET connectors that the company said speed up development and testing for analytics pipelines, business intelligence integrations, and ETL (extract, transform and load) workflows.

“These are three different onramps into that governed data layer that CData provides, meeting developers where they are in the environments and the platforms they are working in, as we understand that environment now,” Johnson said.

Marie Forshaw, CData’s senior VP of product marketing, said during the interview with CRN that the new offerings provide the company’s system integrator partners with more flexibility to develop custom solutions on top of Connect AI for their customers.

Interworks’ Joshi, who called CData Connect AI “a very unique offering,” said that in this “everything-as-code” era, tool vendors that provide flexibility around their products, “suddenly the adaptability of the tool increases multi-fold—and I think that’s what [CData] is trying to do here.”

Joshi said Connect AI Python SDK “solves the major issue of trustability” because everything within the Python Package Index online store and library has been vetted for security vulnerabilities and more. And CData CLI provides partners with more development options and control over the tools, he said.