Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Tomer Shiran, co-founder and CEO, Dremio
Extracting More Value from Data
As companies evolve their business through digital transformation, data becomes ever more important, and the companies that do the best job of extracting value from data will outpace their competition.
Data Consumers take the spotlight. It is data consumers-data scientists, analysts, BI users, statisticians-who are in the trenches, finding data’s value, and making discoveries that advance strategic interests. Globally there are approximately 200 million data consumers, and in 2019 companies will start to recognize that improving the productivity of this worker class will drive massive value to their bottom lines. Expect to see significant efforts to study the daily workflow of these individuals, and investments to improve productivity, increase training, and provide greater retention offerings.
Big Metadata. As the number and size of datasets have grown for organizations, the fixed costs associated with working with metadata have become very painful. Most systems were not built to deal with large amounts of metadata. In many cases, these systems rely on traditional relational stores to solve metadata problems. The irony is that people solving big data problems don’t assume that their own system will have these same problems. Having data consumers frustrated with fixed costs for every operation can ultimately doom data democratization projects since non-technical users have minimal patience. In 2019 we will see cloud platform vendors, Big Data technology vendors, and data-centric organizations focus on solutions for Big Metadata using some of the patterns that have been effective for Big Data.
Data-as-a-Service is the next evolution in analytics. We are now 10 years into the AWS era, which began with an on-demand infrastructure, billed by the hour, and has now moved up through the entire stack to include full applications and every building block in between. Now companies want the same kind of on-demand experience for their data that is provisioned for the specific needs of an individual user, instantly, with great performance, ease of use, compatibility with their favorite tools, and without waiting months for IT. Using open source projects, open standards, and cloud services, companies will deliver their first iterations of Data-as-a-Service to data consumers across critical lines of business.
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About the Author
Tomer Shiran is co-founder and CEO of Dremio. Previously, he headed the product management team at MapR and was responsible for product strategy, road map and requirements. Prior to MapR, Shiran held numerous product management and engineering roles at IBM and Microsoft, most recently as the product manager for Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (now Microsoft Forefront). He is the founder of two websites that have served millions of users, and received coverage in prestigious publications such as the New York Times, USA Today and the Times of London. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is the author of five US patents.
