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Summary
The exponential growth of data inside organizations requires integration to optimize the business outcome business leaders are striving for. They want to optimize the use of data generated by their systems and ‘things’.
However, how do you do that? Where do you get started? What does the required architecture look like? In the Platform podcast series DATA DRIVEN INNOVATION Ed Macosky, VP of Product @Boomi and Mike Veldhuis, Partner @Nalta, will dig into these topics. Listen to learn and for a bit of fun too!
Episode Notes
The Platform Website: https://www.nalta.com/theplatform
All Nalta Blogs: https://www.nalta.com/blog
Host, Mike Veldhuis
https://www.nalta.com/mikeveldhuis
Guest, Ed Macosky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emacosky/
Transcript
Mike Veldhuis 0:00
You are listening to The Platform. Podcast to learn about our digital world. I am Mike Veldhuis, partner at Nalta.com.
Ed Macosky 0:11
I'm Ed Macosky, head of products at Boomi.
Mike Veldhuis 0:16
Welcome to episode number seven: top trends in data and value. And the careful listener notice that I'm not talking about episode number three. It's actually episode number seven. It made more sense Data Wise to continue counting beyond four doesn't it Ed?
Ed Macosky 0:39
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Mike Veldhuis 0:42
Welcome in our third podcast, we're going to record about data driven companies. And really a pleasure, Episode One and two. And today, we're going to talk about the future. But before we do so, I read something in the news earlier today about that it's 140 years ago, that in the Netherlands, we were first capable of having a telephone conversation.
Ed Macosky 1:15
Well, that's interesting.
Mike Veldhuis 1:17
And that's five years.
Ed Macosky 1:18
I didn't know that.
Mike Veldhuis 1:19
Five years after the invention of the telephone system by Bell and Watson, is it I think. I found it very cool.
Ed Macosky 1:30
Very, very cool. That can relate to data quite a bit.
Mike Veldhuis 1:33
Yeah, it's like, it's not that long ago, you know, everything went so fast. And that we are here now that's, that's just crazy. And a funny fact in the light that we're going to talk about everything else that's going to happen in the future. And it's awesome to have you part of this series, because you're in the leadership team of Boomi. You're a thought leader on integration. So my question is pure and simple. What's going to happen in the future Ed?
Ed Macosky 2:09
What is going to happen in the future? Well, I mean, we're in this connected world, I mean, the future is literally going to be more and more connection, people data, etc. I mean, we're seeing this evolution. That's what really excites me. I think we talked previously about, you know, what is integration and people didn't understand what this this stuff was earlier in my career, but it's, but it's everywhere. And I think, things people, everything is going to be connected at some point. So it's fun to be kind of leading the charge in that from a vendor perspective.
Mike Veldhuis 2:45
Yeah, there are some topics. I always love to read articles from Gartner, they have this hype cycle, which is awesome. drink a beer, what's the hype cycle. One of the my favourite things to do. And of course, there are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain. Is this something that you are working on at Boomi?
Ed Macosky 3:16
All of the above. So, I mean, from a blockchain perspective, we've got connectivity to those, we're working with some early adopters, on how they can uptake this technology, so on and so forth, I think, last I saw that may be somewhere in the trough of disillusionment or something from a Gartner perspective. But there's a lot of exciting things going on there prototypes, obviously, everyone, that sort of blockchain connects it to cryptocurrency in some way, shape, or form.
Another in the AI ML space, we actually are early in a partnership with a company called Aible. We're working with them fairly closely. They do. They're bringing AI and ML to, you know, low code developers as well, with many of these new technologies. What happens is, early on in the cycle, it's very technical, it's very hard, or at least it feels that way to people, they need to understand something new. And then there's a lot of code so on and so forth. blockchain AI ML, same thing. If data scientists, there's this learning curve, but what Aible has done is they brought forth, a citizen type experience to doing AI and ML. And we've, co developed some connectivity to their system. So essentially, as you're integrating systems, you can dump data off the side into this, their platform and their toolset in order to make decisions and look forward, about your business. And a lot of those use cases are in the sales. You know, what are my sales going to look like if I slide some bars in their product, and I add or remove more sales reps, that sort of thing. That's that kind of stuff that people are most interested in today. But there's a lot of use cases for that to kind of predict the future for yourself.
Mike Veldhuis 4:51
What is it exactly what you're referring to a slider for sales?
Ed Macosky 4:56
Yeah, they have sliders and this is how citizen it is, right. So it's not about writing code to come up with these models. They create models for you. And you can log into their system and slide bars around. It's it's a, you know, okay, I've got one sales rep, or I've got 50, I can slide the bar and I can make decisions on my business. That's just one example. But you can say how much marketing funding those types of things you can build these models and predict the future for your business. Pretty cool.
Mike Veldhuis 5:23
Awesome. The title is top trends, are those the trends that I just mentioned? Or is there more happening in this space?
Ed Macosky 5:36
I do think blockchain is a trend I, jury's out for me on where that is going. Right. There's a lot of things around data and, data sovereignty, privacy things. We'll see how that works itself out. But I do think AI and artificial intelligence, and machine learning is certainly a futuristic trend that's going to keep going right. around our it's just automation in general, how do I how do I predict the future with the data that I have? I think that's extremely value to everyone. And again, you know, you'll hit some moral compass at some point around robotics and what these things can do. You know, I don't have a tinfoil hat on here. So that doesn't bother me. But I do think that is that as a future, that's one of the more exciting things for me is to see where that that journey takes us.
Mike Veldhuis 6:29
The videos I saw from Boston, what the name of that company that builds the robots, Boston, no whatever, I put it in the show notes. So look it up and puts it in. They are kicking robots. They're trying if the robot stopped defending itself, or trying to kick it out of a box, it's it's hurtful for the robots. It's Yeah, it's sad.
Ed Macosky 6:55
For robots
Mike Veldhuis 6:56
For robots, yeah. I get a lot of questions from in my organisation from within Nalta, Mike, there all stuff happening in the blockchain world, and we have all these generations of different blockchains, which started with with Bitcoin, and later Etherium. And now there are blockchain level four, or level three systems that enable, for instance, to build of decentralised applications and stuff like that. So decentralisation of your data and decentralisation of your systems, is becoming something of the near future, there even talks about the Internet OS actually happening. Is this something that Boomi has a play in, something that you are seeing happening in the US?
Ed Macosky 7:58
So we do have a number of our customers that are connecting their systems to blockchains. And that's kind of the role we're playing today, pulling from other data sources and bringing these things in. I do think the majority of what they're doing, though, at this point is development prototyping, kind of dreaming of what they can do with blockchains. But, frankly, from a go to market perspective, and our primary customer use cases, we're not seeing that much uptick in it, it doesn't mean that it's not something of the future. That's why, you know, I made the comment earlier, the jury's still out. For us what I think it is, in the cycle, at least what we see with our customers is, people, particularly with a pandemic, they're trying to, our customers are trying to solve, how to keep the lights on of their business how to make these digital transformations.
And it's not that blockchain couldn't help them with that. I just think it was not the immediate priority that we've seen in the last in the last year or two. But I do think there's potential coming out of this, we're seeing, there has been this kickstart in digital transformation, those who have been behind are now accelerating things. A lot of small banks have engaged with us on transforming their business where they've had in person kind of operations and let the big banks do the the online thing. But as they've now accelerated their transformation, to try to compete with these big banks, I think there is possibility particularly, there's been some resistance using blockchain and the financial industry as a whole. But but there's some evidence coming that you know, these banks are being pushed and who knows, maybe the smaller banks will start pushing the envelope and force the bigger banks to uptake some of this. And we're seeing some of the big banks are prototyping and doing some development work around this and putting a lot of money behind it. So it is something we could be at a tipping point where it takes off.
Mike Veldhuis 9:58
So actually, what you're saying is the top trends in value is more on the axis of digital transformation actually happening. Maybe because of Corona it got a Kickstarter, right?
Ed Macosky 10:10
Yeah, yep. Yeah.
Mike Veldhuis 10:12
And when I talk to our partners and customers, what a lot of IT guys or management is struggling with, and actually had two calls today in two different examples, where they told me, okay, our management or our C-level heard about the Holo Glass (Lens :-) ), or they learned about AI or they learned about blockchain. And now we have to do something with blockchain. But it's not our first priority. Our first priority is making sure we have this data architecture layer in place. So we're able to really translate business needs into technology to make it work. And maybe in the future, we'll have these HoloLens or other fancy stuff, but it's not our priority right now. It's not where the world is heading. Now. Is that something that resonate with you?
Ed Macosky 11:11
It absolutely does
I mean, it goes back to I mean, that's where you have the intersection of AI ML and and data, data warehousing, datamart's etc, right? I do see, including us, we have our own data warehouse based on, underneath our platform that gives us intelligence on things we want to do. We struggled with some of the same things our business kept asking us. What about this? What about that? Can you give us this data? And it was, hey, we're in the process, all these new technologies are rising, right? You know, snowflake is one of them. In a data warehousing kind of space, and others, Oracle's got autonomous data warehouse, etc. So these different data stores are rising. And that's a trend and a lot of businesses today are focused on that, how can I deal with my massive amounts of data? Literally, terabytes, and terabytes and terabytes of data?
You know, you'll hear about this data explosion that's happening in the world. Michael Dell has talked about it himself, and people are struggling with that first, as they get those architectures in place, then they can look at forward. What can we do with that data? Some, some companies are ahead of the others. But again, pre pandemic, you know, the folks were not focused enough, in my opinion, on digital transformations, their businesses were doing well, economies were doing well. And this forced a trigger. So I do think some of this will accelerate, people are getting their things in place.
Mike Veldhuis 12:41
I really hope it's a sticky as well, you know, we have to solve the world's from Corona, we have to get rid of it. But I hope this movement is sticky. And we keep keep on developing this way would be awesome. In our preparation, you had a comment, and that is really cool. And the comment was, forget my data. So we're always talking about storing data. And you've told us, you'd have the the opportunity to forget data. Is that something you would like to elaborate on for our audience?
Ed Macosky 13:18
I would, because you know, this ties back to blockchain as well. Right. So the whole the whole concept of blockchain is you're basically locking that data and that history in for the value of why you're doing that you're locking it in, so you have the trail and nobody can change that. But, with data sovereignty, data privacy, these data laws across the world, different countries have different things, we're seeing a lot of pressure about, forget my data. So in the integration systems, we have our, our customers are passing a lot of data between our systems. And we have, we have the responsibility to forget that data on their behalf based on what they'd like us to do. So it's a very interesting, you know, it's very interesting for me to look out and see where those two worlds collide. Because, you know, many of these customers are saying I want data forgotten, but within 30 days, some customers saying I want you to keep a history of data. So I have it because I have other privacy requirements to keep that history. So it's we're in an interesting time right now based on individuals wanting to be forgotten.
Mike Veldhuis 14:28
Cool. Cool. And then time flies again. Oh, man, it's too fast. But it's great to dream about this future of cool stuff for your company. But actually achieving business outcomes now with data, enables the innovation for the future. It makes money now so you're able to keep on moving. You know? I have this bad joke. It keeps popping into my mind. Because we opened with the telephone connection that being set up on 140 years ago in the Netherlands the first one. Do you know what the best salesman ever was on earth? You have no clue.
The one who sold the first telephone was. You could not call to anyone!
Okay, have fun. See you in the next episode. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai