I’m incredibly pleased to announce the newest member of the SnapLogic executive team: James Markarian. James joins SnapLogic as our chief technology officer (CTO), bringing more than 25 years of experience working in data integration, application integration and cloud computing. We’re excited to welcome James as he steps into this role and leads SnapLogic’s technology team on its ongoing mission to help global enterprises modernize their data and application integration initiatives.
I caught up with James to discuss his vision for the role of the CTO and how he plans to dive in at SnapLogic.
What attracted you to join the SnapLogic team?
I had a great working relationship with Gaurav [SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon] during our time together at Informatica. When you hear Gaurav talk, you hear something that frankly you don’t from other vendors: a CEO that understands the mechanics of current integration and data challenges. With Gaurav and the team, you also get a vision for how we see and are helping customers realize the future. The final piece for me was seeing the incredible traction SnapLogic has gained recently as proof that customers and industry analysts are getting the message.
You’ll be taking on the role of CTO – has that role evolved over the years?
In the early days, say 10+ years ago, and in small technology startups today, the role of CTO was and is very technical. Either the environment was so static and the work remaining was squeezing out performance or establishing abstraction, etc., or the environment was so new that grass roots innovation was needed. Now, in the integration space, things have shifted.
What’s changed?
Back when Informatica started, lots of things were static. There were a handful of databases, a flat file system and ERP between Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. Things were relatively fixed. Now, database choices are varied, between SQL and NoSQL, ERP has exploded into multiple cloud solutions, operating environments have mutated into a hybrid of on-premises and cloud, and our old friend’s data marts and data warehouses are going through a massive re-think.
What does that mean for the CTO role?
CTO’s are and will always need to be rooted in the technology, including the low-level direction all the way up to the product and company strategy. Furthermore, customers now need help in navigating the technology landscape because there are almost too many decisions to be made. No single vendor knows for sure how the landscape will look 10 or more years from now, so how is the average customer going to sort it out? CTO’s now need to be able to partner with customers to help figure out a direction that makes sense for them.
What are you most looking forward to?
I’m excited to be joining a team that has built a modern, cloud-first iPaaS solution. Our credentials in cloud and hybrid cloud computing are well established. The question for us and our customers now is what are we doing beyond operational integration and how are we starting to address the needs of customers looking to build industrial solutions around data lakes and the Internet of Things. Hard questions like how Hadoop, Spark, machine learning, traditional warehousing and business intelligence all fit together and how do we help make it all work are what I get excited about.
Great stuff. Thanks James! Welcome to SnapLogic. You can read the press release here and connect with James here.
Interested in joining the SnapLogic team? We encourage you to view our current job openings. And, take a glimpse into our corporate culture while you’re at it. Be sure to also connect with us on our various social channels:
