Designing Enterprise Platforms

On this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods speaks with Tara Spalding. Spalding is based in Utah and has extensive experience in enterprise software and startups. She was the VP of marketing at SugarCRM, and is now managing director of Boom Startup Accelerator. Their conversation focuses on startup growth lessons and Spalding’s perspective as an incubator executive in a different environment than is typical for most incubators.

This episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR) focuses on a topic that is pandemic related. The episode is about the key internal usability metrics for understanding the productivity impact of the pandemic. EAR’s Dan Woods speaks with Brian Berns, the CEO of KNOA, a company that focuses on tracking metrics about the user experience and usability, and they offer a service that tracks users. They’ve noticed a lot of interesting things going on with the workforce during the pandemic.

On this episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms Podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods speaks with Poojan Kumar of Clumio. Their conversation focused on why backup isn’t a key source for data mining, analytics and applications. Kumar is one of the co-founders of Clumio, a modern cloud backup solution. Their conversation covers why, ideally, when you create a backup repository, you have a repository of all the data in a company. In some of the modern solutions, that data is actually accessible and organized, meaning it doesn’t involve just tae images of the backups or data in the rawest possible form -- it has actually understood the data and stored it with a schema. Once that occurs, companies can access the data independently of the original system. But then the question is why this data isn’t being used more often for data mining analytics and applications. Highlights of their conversation includes: 4:30 -- What you can do with backup data 11:30 -- What are the problems with exi

This edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR) focuses on data management. EAR’s Dan Woods leads a discussion with Ahana’s Steven Mih and Dipti Borkar about using SQL as an integration point, along with how to use object storage. Their conversation covers: 4:30 -- Presto's history and relevance to today's data management landscape 18:00 -- How Presto can deliver a single repository on a query 25:45 -- How Ahana plans to be profitable on the support model 35:00 -- Why query engines are valuable to get value from your data

In this latest episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods focused on how to optimize your BI, data warehouse and data lake spend in the cloud. He was joined today by Jason Nadeau, the VP of marketing from Dremio, who discussed Dremio and the general strategy he’s developed for optimizing this type of spending in the cloud. Their conversation covered: * 7:00 -- How to take advantage of the cloud * 13:30 -- How performance can drive efficiency in the cloud * 26:15 -- Dremio's optimized features * 36:00 -- Dremio's financial model

On the latest episode of the Designing Enterprise Platform Podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Steven Mih, the CEO of Alluxio, a data orchestration platform that came out of the AMPLab at Berkeley. It is Mih’s second appearance on the podcast; the first episode covered the core value proposition of Alluxio and related issues with respect to the evolution of the data platform and open source. In this episode, Woods and Mih discussed what it’s like for an early adopter trying to create a data platform in the modern environment. Their conversation focused on creating a data layer that allows abstraction in front of many different data sources so that companies can, in an orderly fashion, refactor what’s underneath and move it to where it’s optimally stored and optimally delivered. This is what Alluxio was designed to do. Their conversation covered: * 2:00 — Creating a data layer that utilizes object storage * 7:00 — How Alluxio approaches platforms from a compute optimized way

On this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms Podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Stan Lowe, chief information security officer at a global level for Zscaler, while both were at RSA 2020. This continued a series of interviews Woods conducted that focused on four key questions about cybersecurity. These questions include: Has cybersecurity been an area in which platforms have been slow to develop?  Why have point solutions been so persistent in the cybersecurity arena? Are we entering an era in which platforms may develop?  And if not, how are we going to deal with a world of all these point solutions? Their conversation covered: * 2:30 -- Why haven't platforms developed in cybersecurity? * 5:15 -- Zscaler's offering * 13:45 -- The need for platforms in cybersecurity * 18:30 -- Balancing cybersecurity needs

In this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods continues his series of interviews from RSA 2020 by sitting down with Jeff Hussey and Bryan Skene from Tempered. Their conversation focused on Woods’ key cybersecurity questions for 2020, which include:  Have platforms in cybersecurity been slower to develop than in other domains?  Why has the rise in point solutions been so broad and persistent?  Are we entering a phase in which broad platforms will emerge and take more of the share spending?  How will all the point solutions be made to work together? The podcast covered: 1:00 -- Tempered's approach 6:00 -- Why Tempered is a cybersecurity platform 12:00 -- Why are there so many point solutions in cybersecurity? 17:30 -- Will we ever get a unified platform?

On this new episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms Podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Eyal Hayardeny from Reblaze. Their conversation occurred at RSA 2020 and focused on cybersecurity platforms. They discussed Woods’ four questions for the conference, which include: Have platforms and cybersecurity been slower to develop than in other domains?  Why has the rise in point solutions been so broad and persistent in cybersecurity?  Are we entering a phase in which broad platforms will emerge and take more of the share of spending?  And, if not, how will all the point solutions be made to work together? Reblaze has a suite of related cybersecurity products and focus on integrating different cybersecurity components.  Key points in the podcast include: 1:00 - Reblaze's offering 6:00 - The cause of the slower evolution of cybersecurity platforms 11:00 - Why point solutions have been so prolific 15:50 - The characteristics of the end point solutions aggregators

On this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast with Dan Woods of Early Adopter Research (EAR), Woods speaks with Brendan Hannigan, the CEO and cofounder of Sonrai Security. Sonrai Security is a company that helps govern and secure public cloud platforms. The conversation is part of a series of interviews that occurred at RSA 2020 and covered key questions about the viability of platforms in the cybersecurity landscape, including: * Why have platforms in cybersecurity been slower to develop than in other domains? * Why has the rise in point solutions been so broad and persistent? * Are we entering a phase in which broad platforms will emerge and take more of the share of spending? * And if not, how will all the point solutions be made to work together? Their conversation also covered: 2:00 -- An overview of Sonrai's offerings 5:30 -- Why are there not more platforms in cybersecurity? 13:00 -- The difference between platforms for cybersecurity and other areas of technology 22:00 -- The importan

On this episode of Early Adopter Research’s (EAR) Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast, EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Chris Braden from eSentire. Braden is the head of channels and alliances at the company. He spoke about Woods’ research questions at RSA 2020, which included: * What’s blocking comprehensive platforms for cybersecurity? * Have platforms in cybersecurity been slower to develop than in other domains? * Why has the rise in point solutions been so broad and persistent in cybersecurity? * Are we entering a phase in which broad platforms will emerge and take more of the share of spending? And if not, how will all the point solutions be made to work together? Their conversation covered eSentire as well, including: 1:30 - eSentire's approach to cybersecurity 13:00 - What makes developing platforms for cybersecurity different and how point solutions must work together 19:00 - The challenges of integrating end point solutions

On this episode of Early Adopter Research’s (EAR) Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast, Dan Woods, principal and founder of EAR spoke with Rick Tracy, the chief security officer of Telos. Their conversation center on the EAR research mission called “Creating a Balanced Cybersecurity Portfolio.” Tracy has significant hands on experience as a chief information security officer executive, and shared his thoughts on what companies need to consider when managing cybersecurity as a portfolio. This is Tracy’s second appearance on the podcast. Key points in their conversation included: * 1:45 -- What Telos does * 13:00 -- How using a cybersecurity framework helps CEOs * 22:00 -- How pruning can occur by using a framework * 32:00 -- How products must always be viewed within the context of the people using them

On the latest edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms Podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana about observability. It’s a concept that Woods has been studying since learning of what Etsy did to make the development process faster. Etsy created huge amounts of observability so they could actually make many changes every day and if anything went wrong, they would find out about it immediately. This practice has become popular in DevOps and in monitoring operational environments. Dutt has been working on software structure that supports observability. Their conversation covered: 4:30 — The origins of Grafana Labs 18:20 — Grafana Labs’ focus 39:00 — The benefits of a platform approach 47:00 — The challenges of this approach 51:00 — The positive and negative trends in open source right now

On this edition of the earlyadopter.com podcast, Early Adopter’s Dan Woods dove into the topic of what cloud data warehouse best fits your needs. Joining him for the conversation were Raghu Chakravarthi, chief product officer of Actian and Bill Westfall, VP of customer success and professional services of Actian. Early Adopter recently completed two papers with Actian, one on changing the concept of total cost of ownership about cloud data warehouses to total cost of usage and the other about the five myths of cloud data warehouses. Those tie into this conversation which covered: 3:00 -- Why new cloud data warehouses are needed 10:30 -- The new frameworks needed for cloud data warehouses 30:00 -- The lessons Actian has learned about implementation

In the latest episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Laird Popkin, who most recently served as CTO of the Hearst Transportation Group, which is a group of B2B companies that provide data and data services related to cars, trucks and airplanes. Popkin previous worked at Kaplan and also helped to create a company for large-scale peer-to-peer data synchronization called Pando. Their conversation explored two main concepts for CTOs, CEOs, or CIOs trying to reconstruct their data platforms: DevOps and DataOps. Their conversation covered: * 5:35 - How Popkin implemented DevOps successfully * 15:30 - How to break down silos * 21:30 - The challenges of DataOps

In this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast of Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods speaks with Dan Seltzer, the former CTO of Credit Junction, about modern data architectures. The term modern data architecture has been used by vendors to mean a variety of things but Woods’ conversation focuses on the transition from the data architecture of SQL databases and data warehouses, and Hadoop, to the cloud. Their conversation covered: *5:15 -- What do we mean when we say modern data architectures? *18:30 -- The need to know where your data is without using complex code *33:00 -- The functions of data catalog

In this episode of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), EAR’s Dan Woods speaks with Monte Zweben, the CEO and cofounder of Splice Machine. Like Woods, Zweben has been an observer of the Hadoop ecosystem for quite some time. Splice Machine is a distributed SQL database but it’s also a database that is able to handle transactional workloads and analytical workloads at scale at the same time. Given that many of those analytic workloads were handled on Hadoop, their conversation centers on the recent happenings with Hadoop. Their conversation covered: * 5:25 -- The history of Hadoop and the problems it faces * 21:00 -- Why schema on read was a major problem for Hadoop * 31:00 -- What is needed for a true big data architecture * 42:15 -- Why scale out architectures are cheaper than scale up

On this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), Dan Woods, founder and principal analyst at EAR speaks with Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of DataCoral. DataCoral is a product that is focused on automating the creation and maintenance of data pipelines. Their conversation covered how technology can create value from data. Now that every business has a wealth of data about its operations and its customers, there’s a huge number of products focused on making this data valuable. Their conversation covered: * 2:30 — DataCoral’s origin story * 10:00 — DataCoral’s product dogmas * 35:00 — How DataCoral constrains the problem of creating data pipelines

In this edition of the Early Adopter Research’s Designing Enterprise Platforms Podcast, Dan Woods, principle analyst of Early Adopter Research spoke with Stephen Owens, the CTO of ThoughtWire. They discussed ThoughtWire’s platform for creating interesting applications based on sensor data, digital twins, and various types of automaton and analysis. Their conversation covered: * 2:00 -- The power of semantics with digital twins * 18:30 -- The core dogmas of ThoughtWire * 33:00 -- ThoughtWire's magic tricks with specific use cases

On this edition of the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast of Early Adopter Research (EAR), Dan Woods, the founder and principal analyst at Early Adopter Research speaks with Steven Mih, the CEO of a new company called Alluxio. Alluxio is a company that comes out of the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, which brought the world Spark and many other products for processing data at scale. The AMPLab has created a stack that has a variety of different components, and Alluxio was originally Tachyon and then now has become, in its commercial form, Alluxio. They spoke about an issue of separating the storage from compute engines from the actual compete engines themselves. In the cloud, companies have had increasingly amounts of possibilities of storing in object storage and then having a variety of different compute engines applied to that storage. But that leads to having storage in many places. Some of that storage may be on something like S3, some of it may be on premise, some of it may be in another cloud. The solution