SnapLogic co-founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon sat down recently with Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, for a wide-ranging podcast discussion of all-things-data.
The two discussed how the data management landscape has changed in recent years, the rise of advanced analytics, the move from data warehouses to data lakes, and other changes which are enabling organizations to “take back their enterprise.”
A few highlights:
- On data management then vs. now: When looking at what has changed in recent years, aside from the consistent problem of “how do you make a complex enterprise run,” pretty much everything else has changed, said Gaurav. Why? Two important factors: a) the move to the cloud which brings new data types, new data sources, a proliferation of applications, and decentralized users, all of which requires a new data management approach and modern set of technologies, and b) self-service is now a standard requirement and, coupled with millennial expectations, has fundamentally altered the landscape.
- On the role of advanced analytics: Gaurav noted that analytics used to be primarily about reporting, for companies who wanted to get a rear-view mirror historical perspective, but this is now table-stakes and no longer enough. Now companies want to know not just what is happening right now but also what is likely to happen in the future, so predictive analytics, discovery and recommendation engines, machine learning, artificial intelligence and so on are where it’s at. This requires new technology architectures and data integration capabilities to support such large-scale, real-time streams of data.
- On the move from data warehouses to data lakes: Data warehouses helped as an organizing principle to corral, marshall and reap the benefits of your enterprise data, said Gaurav, but data lakes come in at an earlier development. With data lakes, you put in all the data you can afford to keep, without duplication, which may be noise today but as algorithms improve and as computers get faster, you will eventually be able to get signal out of the noise. Moving forward, as the worlds of cloud apps and big data collide, you’ll see data lakes increasingly move to the cloud, said Gaurav.
- On “taking back your enterprise”: Gaurav explained that we’ve moved beyond a world where business processes and analytics were effectively dictated by the big ERP vendors. Now with new tech capabilities sitting alongside self-service, much like when listening to music in our personal lives, businesses can now compose exactly what they want, integrate and assemble things together exactly as they need them — whether POS data, internet sensors, cloud applications, and more — so they can truly own their enterprise once again.
You can listen to the entire podcast here.
