Matt Maccaux leads Dell EMC’s global Big Data Practice and he’s one of the featured speakers in our upcoming 2/22 webinar, Building a Modern Data Architecture.
We recently caught up with Matt and asked him 3 questions about his work in Big Data Services.
Attivio: You work with customers on their Big Data environments. What are the biggest challenges they face?
Over at least the last decade, we’ve seen a steady rise in the demand for self-service BI and analytical tools. More and more organizations realize the business value of their data for growing revenue, acquiring and retaining customers, streamlining operations, and lowering costs.
We recently had a chance to catch up with him and get his take on the latest trends & happenings in Big Data & Hadoop.
Attivio: What challenges are you seeing among Cloudera clients?
Hadoop and big data projects in general usually encompass the management and analysis of many different forms of data. Sometimes the data sources can be quite diverse and there are many different types of implementations depending on what an organization is trying to achieve.
Good question. What is the point? The point is to create measurable business value from enterprise data. Of course, before measurable business value comes insight. The Modern Data Architecture (MDA) recognizes that insight can lie hidden in data of all types—structured or unstructured, messy or modeled, historical or realtime.
The other day I Googled, “the problem with a modern data architecture.” Of course, at Attivio we’re big evangelists for an MDA, but it’s always interesting to see what the contrarians have to say. There were over three million returns, but none on the first two pages said a word about problems. Lots of articles about how to develop an MDA or how to optimize an MDA or why you had to have an MDA. You get the picture.
The scope and scale of today’s enterprise challenges are unprecedented in terms of their complexity. Vast volumes of information are scattered across the ecosystem and around the globe, and enterprises often are expected to dynamically retrieve precisely the right data set on a moment’s notice to win a customer’s loyalty. If not, other vendors eagerly await to win that customer’s lifetime business. Every transaction is a lifetime transaction.
In this hyper complex and hyper competitive environment, no single vendor can do it all by themselves. The success of one enterprise is inextricably linked to the quality of its partnerships. OEM partners, by nature, often form the critical core of another’s customer-facing solution. And so it is with TIBCO.
If Aesop is right and we are known by the company we keep, Attivio’s success is a direct result of our associations with our top-notch channel partners. One of our longstanding resellers is Cadeon, an IT services and solutions provider based in Alberta, Canada. We recently checked in with Cadeon CEO Phil Unger about his ongoing work with Attivio.
Attivio: Tell us about your experience as an Attivio reseller.
The search market has come a long way from 2007 when Attivio was founded. We took some time to chat with Attivio co-founder and CTO Will Johnson about just how far Attivio has come and how the search market itself has evolved.
Q: You are one of Attivio’s founders. What’s the story behind Attivio’s origins? What challenges were you addressing?
WJ: The original founders of Attivio came from various search backgrounds: FAST (Fast Search and Transfer) which was sold to Microsoft, Altavista, and Northern Light. We had a lot of deep search expertise.
If your organization is going to win on analytics, it needs to view all of its information as a strategic enterprise asset. This includes not just the 10% you know about, but the 90% of dark data that hides in information silos. There are big challenges on the path to surfacing all of your enterprise information for business intelligence. The biggest challenge is not in storing data, or in analyzing it, but actually finding the right data. But why is it so hard? Here are the top three reasons:
It's pretty obvious to anyone who follows analytics and Big Data that an end-to-end solution for the Big Data stack will require best-of-breed technologies from multiple vendors. No single vendor can develop all the technology pieces on its own. New applications and data processing frameworks emerge and change much too quickly. As enterprises strive to create a modern and flexible hybrid data infrastructure, they look for technologies that are easy to embed and extend.
That's why Dell EMC™ chose the Attivio Data Unification Platform for its Analytic Insights Module. The Attivio platform is definitely OEM friendly. Its architecture is open, scalable, and API-accessible, which makes for secure and seamless integration with other systems.
