Why I joined Yellowbrick
It’s an incredibly exciting time to be in the data and analytics space. Businesses are speeding up rather than slowing down the pace of their digital transformation initiatives, partly driven in response to the pandemic. More, now than ever, enterprises want to remain close to their customers and in front of their evolving buying behaviors. Organizations also want to optimize and more accurately predict the costs of doing business during these uncertain times and maintain the integrity of their supply chains.
The need for organizations to transform into intelligent enterprises by integrating real-time, AI/ML-based decision support and automation in their operations is driving so much innovation in the Analytics and Business Intelligence market. Many tools, including PowerBI, Tableau and Microstrategy, have added augmented analytics capabilities that make it easier to put advanced analytics to work for the business. And we’re seeing a convergence of many of the tools in terms of capability as vendors seek to provide more of an end-to-end analytics experience to customers.
One area of the data and analytics market that has been lacking innovation is data warehousing. The need for a data warehouse as a core component of a business has never been stronger. As the repository of some of the most valuable data in an organization, the data warehouse powers not only the traditional run-the-business BI reporting tools and dashboards, it also feeds the new AI/ML models that power the predictive and prescriptive analytics that drive decision-making in an intelligent enterprise.
The lack of innovation in data warehousing stems in part because the market is dominated by long-term incumbents stuck in the Innovators Dilemma. The incumbents think of themselves as ‘sticky’, and safe from being displaced because of the perception that moving workloads to another data warehouse platform is going to be too complex, take too long, and be too expensive for customers to do. They think: “why spend R&D dollars to continually innovate to defend our base when we don’t need to?”
Except the enterprise market is changing. The data warehouse space is primed for disruption. Enterprises today are looking for ways to get out of legacy vendor lock-ins that aren’t helping to reduce the time to value and increase the return on their analytics investments. Customers now want the flexibility and agility that comes with a consumer cloud experience; one that makes it easy to try, buy and grow on the hybrid- or multi-cloud platform of their choice at an affordable price. The legacy vendors are not adapting to address this new market reality.
I chose to join Yellowbrick because this talented team has a clear vision of what a modern data warehouse should look like and are innovating in the areas that are most important to enterprise customers today. Yellowbrick are investing in making the data warehousing user experience a better one – as a result, migrating data and workloads from legacy data warehouses to Yellowbrick couldn’t be easier.
I also joined because at the heart of Yellowbrick lies a differentiating combination of hardware and software that delivers game-changing performance at a predictable price. I fundamentally believe that commodity hardware won’t deliver the extreme analytics performance that businesses want. Yellowbrick’s ability to deploy purpose-built hardware in the cloud and on-premises makes it a truly disruptive data warehousing solution. It provides the foundational capabilities to support the real-time decisioning that enterprises are now demanding and that legacy data warehouses can’t offer.
Yellowbrick also knows that simply throwing more boxes or VMs at the problem is not the answer – it doesn’t make financial or environmental sense. The drive to do more with less is incredibly important to me. Yellowbrick has the ability to scale out to support the largest data volumes and most complex workloads within a fraction of the footprint, and at a fraction of the cost, of other vendors.
Choosing to join Yellowbrick was an easy decision for me to make. More and more customers are finding that switching from legacy solutions to Yellowbrick’s modern data warehouse is an easy decision for them to make too.
