The amount of data being created every minute is massive, and companies can use that data to improve their operations. Getting the maximum value from data requires harnessing the power of cloud data warehousing.

In this video, Yellowbrick’s Head of Product Marketing Umair Waheed and ActualTech Media’s Analyst and Webinar Moderator Scott Bekker discuss the benefits and common challenges enterprises face when running their data warehouses in the cloud, how to maximize the value of your cloud data warehouse, and more.

Transcript:

Scott Bekker:

I’m Scott Bekker, a moderator and analyst with ActualTech Media. Welcome to our ActualTech Media solution spotlight series. I’m excited to be here with Umair Waheed, who’s head of product marketing at Yellowbrick Data. Umair, welcome.

Umair Waheed:

Thanks, Scott. Great to be here.

Scott Bekker:

So I understand Yellowbrick offers enterprise cloud data warehouse. How does Yellowbrick define that term, enterprise cloud data warehouse?

Umair Waheed:

Yeah. So cloud data warehousing is doing data warehousing in the cloud – I guess is the obvious term – but data warehousing in the cloud has really grown from what we used to do when we used to talk about data warehousing on-premises. And it’s grown both in the terms of the size and scale of data that we deal with, but also in the audience of who we serve data to.

In the cloud, we want to serve data to many more people. Data is really so important now in terms of, it has board-level visibility. People really want to maximize and extract the ultimate value from their data. And that means getting it in front of as many people as possible. So one of the challenges that used to happen in the on-premises world or the legacy world is that we used to really restrict who could see data.

So that’s one of the, I guess, one of the great things about cloud data warehousing. It gives us that size and scale to do things and to provide data to that broader audience.

Scott Bekker:

So that makes the benefits really clear. But what are the challenges that enterprises face when trying to run their data warehouses, which they’re used to having on-premises, in the cloud?

Umair Waheed:

So the cloud is new. A lot of people have to try and learn how to get the best out of the cloud. Lifting and shifting legacy and old technologies to the cloud really doesn’t make sense, there are very few cost savings to be made. So learning how to do cloud well is the first challenge.

The cloud also brings a lot of benefits in terms of agility and scale and elasticity, but that also comes with risk. So the risk is that you can very easily get into a situation where your costs run away with themselves – because we find a lot of times, data is so important that some really successful projects become victims of their own success. That actually people start doing more and more analytics, more and more reporting projections for cloud spend and cloud costs go through the roof. So keeping a cap on those costs is super important, it’s something where Yellowbrick really has some differentiation.

Scott Bekker:

Yeah. Let’s dig into that a little bit. So what does Yellowbrick do to solve some of those issues, especially the costs?

Umair Waheed:

Yellowbrick is a SQL data warehouse. So firstly, it’s really familiar to people. So we are a SQL data warehouse. SQL is the lingua franca of the analytics world. And that hasn’t changed despite the prediction of its demise many times.

So familiarity, you can use Yellowbrick from all the tools from Excel, from Tableau, from Power BI, all the tools that you’re used to using – and all the integration tools as well – that you’ve used to do analytics historically. So on one hand, there’s very few new skills to learn.

Yellowbrick also is built efficiently, so we make much better use of the underlying infrastructure. And what that means for our customers is that they can do a lot more on a smaller footprint. So that means effectively lower cost in terms of cloud infrastructure and also the need to scale less often, which can help to provide a cap on those costs.

But it also means that we can provide really good, consistent performance back to the end users. So again, coming back to one of those challenges – you don’t want something to be taking 10 seconds one day and 10 minutes the next day. You want a nice, consistent, steady performance. And it’s one of the things we pride ourselves on is being able to deliver consistent performance to large numbers of users running really complex analytics workloads.

At the same time, your enterprise organization might be running some large data integration and data loading tasks. Usually those things conflict with Yellowbrick. We have the means to deconflict those, to balance resources fairly across all those groups, and really deliver exceptional experiences to those end users. And that’s part of helping more people get access to more data is to give them that experience and not put them off by having this variable experience that sometimes they have to go away and have a coffee to run their report. It’s nice, Interactive, and comes back straight away.

Scott Bekker:

Gotcha. Yeah. That consistent performance sounds great. So getting into that issue of helping more end users get value out of the data warehouse, how are your customers using Yellowbrick?

Umair Waheed:

So our customers use Yellowbrick in a whole variety of ways. We have some very large enterprise-scale customers that effectively build a relational data lake or relational, a big relational data warehouse with all their data pool for all of their analysts across their entire organization – so petabytes of data across thousands of people.

We have a lot of financial services organizations that are leaning into some of Yellowbrick’s strengths around security and compliance. One of the differences with Yellowbrick is that you own all of your data all of the time and all of your infrastructure – we don’t get in the way. There’s nothing “Yellowbrick” sitting in the way between you and your data. So security officers love that part of Yellowbrick the ability to be, not have to worry about who’s looking at my data or who can see what. We have other customers that use us to help them deliver services to their customers.

We have a lot of ISVs and other analytics services providers that provide retail analytics, telecoms analytics, healthcare analytics, and security analytics back to their customers. One of our core marquee customers is LexisNexis who have a solution called ThreatMetrix, where they provide analytics services back to their customers. So their customers can query data on anomalous website login behavior to some of their web properties, so that’s a service that they provide out to tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

So many and varied, I would say really strong on the federal side and the highly governed and regulated side of the world, where really that leaning into that ability to avoid having other parties look at your data or look at, or be involved even in your platform, but a broad sway. Then that’s even getting more and more broad as we move into the cloud.

And we can deal with broader sizes of customers from much smaller customers often to the large, but we really excel at that large, really highly complex end of the spectrum, where we’re often sitting alongside other people’s other platforms, other data platforms that are out there and helping them reduce cost and reduce risk and provide more of a consistent service to their customers, whoever their customers might be in the cloud. We talked about runaway cost being a challenge in the cloud, one of the things you can do with Yellowbrick is take some of those really challenging workloads and hype them off onto Yellowbrick and get them more of a consistent service on both sides of the fence on your other technology, but also on Yellowbrick.

Scott Bekker:

Yeah, that sounds really valuable. So if somebody wanted to get started with Yellowbrick or learn more, what would you recommend?

Umair Waheed:

So we’re a friendly organization, find us at yellowbrick.com. You can reach us at info@yellowbrick.com as well, but we can help you get started quickly. Obviously getting one of the advantages of the cloud is you can get started really quickly, particularly if you’re on AWS or Azure, we do have our GCP offering coming soon as well, but yeah, just get in touch. We’re happy to stand up a POC.

The best way to experience Yellowbrick is to see it for yourself on your data. We do have some online demos and hands-on lab experiences that we can get you access to as well if you want to get started quickly, but the best way is to get started with your data on Yellowbrick on the cloud.

Scott Bekker:

All right. Fantastic. Well, Umair, thanks so much for coming on and bringing us up to speed on Yellowbrick. Really appreciate your time.

Umair Waheed:

Thanks, Scott. Great to talk to you.

Scott Bekker:

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