November 22, 2021

Tada’s View From Gartner's Cool Vendor’s Round Table

Founders and leaders of organizations shared their perspectives on the current state of the market.

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Earlier this year, Tada was named a 2021 Cool Vendor based on the Gartner Cool Vendors in Data Management report. 


To be a Cool Vendor, Gartner analysts identify promising companies each year that are making an impact in their respective categories. For businesses that are working in the data management and analytics space, they recognized the efforts of Timbr.ai, Soda Data, Nexla, and Tada. With a future relying on a data fabric that makes distributed data appear consolidated, accessible, and user-friendly, these “cool vendors” are supplying functionality behind such data fabrics.


In a recent episode of A View From The Round Table Of Gartner's Cool Vendors, the founders and leaders of each of these organizations shared their perspectives on the current state of the market and the challenges facing businesses and data professionals today. They offer solutions that are being brought to market for addressing them as well as the work they are doing that got them recognized by Gartner as a "cool vendor".


Interviewees:


Akshay Deshpande (CTO, Tada)

Maarten Masschelein (cofounder CEO Soda Data)

Saket Saurabh (Cofounder and CEO Nexla)

Dan Weitzner (VP and Cofounder timbr.ai)


Points of Discussion:

  • Biggest challenges facing data professionals
  • Who are the target customers and what are the most common data management problems?
  • What are different components of Data Management and why is it so complex, and what will simplify the process.
  • The report covers a lot of new data management terminology – data governance, data observability, data fabric, data mesh, DataOps, MLOps, AIOps – Speakers will digest what this all means and why is it important for data engineers
  • How has the data management space changed in recent times? 
  • What modern data management features are lacking in existing databases?
  • Most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways their respective products are used (in isolation or combined)
  • Most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons learned while working on respective platforms
  • Upcoming trends and challenges



Click here to listen to the podcast in its entirety, and read below for some key takeaways. 


Biggest challenges data professionals are facing:


“The biggest problem is data acquisition, preparation of the data, cleansing of the data, and getting it in a format that can be easily understood. No matter how you look at it, it’s a tedious task and you need to have an understanding of the systems and processes. Once you have that in place, accessing the data becomes easy.” -Akshay Deshpande


“Companies are often flying blind. There are no real structural processes or systems in place to get ahead of problems with data. The data sources, ingestion, schema changes, transformation errors and more can go wrong. There’s a clear lack of serviceability.” -Maarten Masschelein

What are some of the upcoming trends and challenges that you're keeping a close eye on?


“Three trends we are seeing across the ecosystem are the leveraging of AI/ML-based algorithms for giving recommendations on business insights, and the need for having this engine plugged with your data fabric. 


The other aspect is the leveraging of conversational UI. People use dashboards and drill-down mechanisms, but they also want access to the data through conversational UI interfaces. 


Lastly, collaboration across enterprises - where you have set up two different networks, but are trying to exchange information. Traditionally, this would have been done through mechanisms like EDI and other data exchanges, but the ability to exchange the information and be part of this large federated ecosystem is another aspect that we're seeing. At Tada, we are adding these trends as part of our capabilities, giving business users the ability to converse with the system and give them access to the data. ” -Akshay Deshpande


“It's more and more apparent that data is a team sport. We must keep an eye on the community capabilities - how people are going to find a connector, but then share that with the community or find the publicly available data set and make it available to everybody else, in or outside the organization. 


The second thing is that there's a paradox of convergence and fragmentation. Both are increasing at the same time. . . and of course there are no standards right now when it comes to interoperability of tools or companies. The coexistence of this convergence and fragmentation should happen through standards.” -Saket Saurabh


These discussions are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the real goal of a data fabric - making the business's use of distributed data more valuable, innovative, and automated. As pressure mounts to get actionable insights from analytics, Tada is continuing to play an important role in enhancing our customers' use of data through better visibility, agility, and collaboration.