In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Mario Faria, the Data Strategy Advisor at Boa Vista.

Mario will be giving the closing keynote address at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The closing keynote is with Mario, Tony Shaw, and Micheline Casey; it is titled “Chief Data Officers, Data Scientists and Big Data Architects – New Roles for a New World of Data.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Mario Faria on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his address at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): What company do you work for?

Mario Faria (MF): Boa Vista, a credit score company based in Brazil, which is partly owned by Equifax.

DV: What’s your position?

MF: Until I moved to USA in December, I was the Chief Data Officer and Lead Data Scientist. After January, I will be holding the position of Data Strategy Advisor.

DV: How long have you been working for your company?

MF: Since 2011.

DV: Where did you work prior to that?

MF: I have worked for Microsoft, Accenture and IBM, and was responsible for large and complex projects related to Business Intelligence, Digital Marketing, CRM, Supply Chain, Social Media and Web Development

DV: How did you get into this industry?

MF: I have been involved with data and analytics since right after college, as a systems analyst using SAS and SPSS. In the middle 90s, when the Internet started to be used very seriously by business applications, integrating the value chain and the first BI projects started to come up, then I took a deep dive down in the subject. Probably because of being involved with data for so long, I was one of the first chief Data Officers in the world.

DV: What is the most interesting thing about what you do?

MF: I see myself as a bridge between Business and Technology, by using my full skills to deliver sustainable results. I love 2 things about organizations/business units: to start a new one or to fix the ones that are not working.

DV: Which session are you speaking at during EDW 2013?

MF: I will be a speaker during the Thursday morning keynote session on the topic of “Chief Data Officers, Data Scientists and Big Data Architects – New Roles for a New World of Data.”

DV: What will you cover during this session?

MF: I will explore some of the positions and work roles that are becoming common today as the world becomes more and more data-driven.  And I will present how a data team should be structured to achieve its goals.

DV: What do you hope to accomplish during your session?

MF: I plan to demystify some of the confusion about the names and acronyms, and to give something the audience can take back to their job and start to use right way.

DV: Why is your topic timely to EDW 2013?

MF: Because every company I talk to tells me they are striving to find the right talent for their data and analytics needs. And at the same time, the hiring processes are conducted in such a lame manner that the best people feel like is a torture.

DV: What trends do you see in the industry at this time?

MF: First, more and more, we will see Big Data projects delivering very practical results to business.  The investments made in projects will start to pay off quite quickly and the failures will be great lessons learned to be used in the next initiatives.

DV: Where do you think Enterprise Data and Big Data are headed in 2013?

MF: Consolidation of the industry will start to happen quite fast. The Data/Big Data ecosystem is very fragmented with lots of technology and service providers popping up. We will see a tremendous consolidation, when the large companies started to acquire the smaller ones. Just a few of the new disruptors will survive and the majority will just be dead in the next 2 years.

DV: When you aren’t working, what are you likely spending your time doing?

MF: I love to read about history and I am an avid book consumer. Also, I love music especially classic rock and blues.

DV: What’s something interesting about you that most people don’t know?

MF: That I compete in triathlons and running competitions. That’s my mental and body therapy.

If you are interested in attending Mario’s session at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The session is on Thursday, May 2, at 10:50am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Michael Scofield, an Assistant Professor at Loma Linda University.

Michael will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The presentation is titled “Graphic Techniques for Profiling & Understanding Production Data.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Michael Scofield on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at previous companies and/or universities (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession and currently as a researcher?

Michael Scofield (MS): After getting my MBA degree at UCLA, I spent most of my career in the private sector doing decision-support, data architecture, and eventually evolving into data quality assessment.  At Loma Linda University now, I teach part-time in Health Information Management (a field which used to be called “medical records”, but now is automated).  I am also doing “institutional research” for another university.  In higher education, that role is quite specific, providing the leadership with an understanding of student behavior coming from the enrollment database.

DV: What’s the focus of the research you are currently engaged in?

MS: We are wanting to mine our data for what factors may contribute to student success, or be predictors of the same.  The Provost is also very interested in where the students will be coming from five years from now.  I will eventually branch out into analysis of the cost of various academic programs, and determining how successful the students are at getting rewarding careers after graduation.

DV: What is the biggest change going in data architecture at this time?

MS: I think data architecture, as a discipline, has been a “forgotten child” in the rush to build new applications faster, especially with the popular “agile development”.  I believe that “agile” runs quite contrary to the tradition and culture of thoughtful (but not paralyzing) analysis, and design of a stable logical data model which will serve the enterprise (or function) for a long time into the future.  Fast development reflects a shortened attention span in the executive suites all over America.   No so much outside the U.S.

DV: How does such a change affect your research?

MS: My immediate research is unrelated to data architecture.

DV: How do you think such a change will affect the industry over the next few years?

MS: Given my direct experience, and close observations (from a safe distance) of a number of for-profit companies which have had spectacular failures in custom-developed applications, I think that such failures will continue as long as CIO’s do not understand the nature of data as an asset, data architecture as an enterprise asset, and as long as CIO’s focus more on project completion without regard to quality and survivability of the applications being built.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

MS: My immediate topic at EDW is how graphic techniques can be employed to understand production data behavior, and spot quality problems in that data.  In particular, over linear dimensions (the most common being time) a definitional discontinuity may undermine the usefulness of data being fed into a data warehouse.  Understanding production data is much more than merely collecting physical structures and column definitions.  It requires understanding the completeness, reasonability, and reliability of production data generated by business activity.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect data architecture in future?

MS: That is difficult to discern.  Data architects may have to be more agile, and figure out how to integrate the architectures of multiple, disparate sources.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

MS: Something about me?  I am interested in too many topics for my own good.  I am an intellectual hedonist; just soaking up learning in history, science, and other topics.  My latest lecture for general audiences is about Eleanor Roosevelt, and her activities during World War Two.  Has nothing to do with data management, but it is enormous fun.

If you are interested in attending Michael’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The presentation is on Wednesday, May 1, at 8.30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed James G. Kobielus, the Senior Program Director of Product Marketing and Big Data Analytics Solutions (aka Big Data Evangelist) at IBM.

James will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The presentation is titled “Data Scientists: Grow and Sustain a Big Data Center of Excellence.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question James G. Kobielus on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession)?

James G. Kobielus (JGK): I’m IBM’s Big Data Evangelist. I’m an industry veteran who spearheads IBM’s thought leadership activities in big data, data science, enterprise data warehousing, advanced analytics, Hadoop, business intelligence, data management, and next best action technologies. I work with IBM’s product management and marketing teams across the big data analytics portfolio. Prior to joining IBM, I was a leading industry analyst, with firms including Forrester Research, Current Analysis, and Burton Group. I have spoken at such leading industry events as IBM Information On Demand, IBM Big Data Integration and governance, Strata, Hadoop Summit, and Forrester Business Process Forum. I have published several business technology books and am a very popular provider of original commentary on blogs, podcasts, bylined business/technology press publications, and many social media.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

JGK: I focus on big data in all of its aspects: platforms, tools, applications, best practices, case studies, and so forth.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

JGK: The inexorable transformation of all big data analytics into low-cost, always-on, elastically provisioned cloud-computing services.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

JGK: Cloud is becoming a more central theme in my thought leadership activities as IBM’s big data evangelist.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

JGK: Game-changing analytics applications don’t spring spontaneously from bare earth. You must plant the seeds through continuing investments in applied data science and, of course, in the big data analytics platforms and tools that bring it all to fruition. But you’ll be tilling infertile soil if you don’t invest in sustaining a data science center of excellence (CoE) within your company. In this presentation, I will discuss what it takes to establish a CoE that foster data-science best practices in support of big data; provide depth on such key data science CoE objectives and programs as multi-disciplinary cross-training, quant/suit alignment, and business analyst skills enhancement; and outline the potential use of CoEs in cross-disciplinary team building, recruitment, and proof-of-concept demonstration.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months? How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

JGK: In the past 12 months, I transitioned from being an industry analyst into being IBM’s big data evangelist. Over the next 1-2 years, I expect my role at IBM to deepen into a wider range of thought leadership activities related to industry-specific applications of big data analytics.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

JGK: The rapid phase-out of hard disk drives (HDD) in favor of solid state drives (SSD) in data storage architectures everywhere.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

JGK: It’s going to give me ample fresh fodder for thought leadership under IBM.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

JGK: I’m deeply into yoga.

If you are interested in attending James’ presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The presentation is on Wednesday, May 1, at 11:30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Benjamin F. Wirtz, the CEO at Unifyo.

Benjamin will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “Making the Case for Leaving Customer Data Decentralized.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Benjamin on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

Benjamin Wirtz (BW):I was always thought that we way companies use and process customer data is broken. There is nothing wrong about wanting to have a great “Customer Relationship Management” system, but when doing IT consulting and research at University, I saw projects going into one of two directions. Most big companies ran incredibly expensive data integration projects with solution providers and consultants, who also restructured the company’s internal organisation – often with poor results because of the complexity of these projects. Smaller companies avoid these expensive and time consuming projects and rather adopt minimalistic systems due to resource restrictions, but then can’t compete in terms of customer context which is available to their employees. I observed changes in technology which would allow for much simpler and effective solutions – ultimately I founded the company behind Unifyo.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

BW: As the CEO of a small but quickly growing organisation, I’m still deeply involved in developing the product. Our current focus is on working closely with our customers to really understand their needs, instead of just making quick sales. We are really just starting with Unifyo but have solved some complex challenges for our customers already. It’s key for us to see more data integration and CRM challenges, see which companies can and can not yet benefit from Unifyo and improve the technology accordingly.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

BW: With the move to cloud hosted apps and of course social media, there is an exploding number if silos which hold crucial business data. Customer data is a special challenge, because in places like Facebook and Twitter, it’s not even 100% accessible to companies, but they are depending on other companies to provide APIs. While in the old days companies were able to customise the applications they bought, they can’t do this any more with Software as a Service.

The result is a massive increase in data but a decline in data Accessibility – and of course this process is accelerating all the time.

Data integration projects, especially when combining company internal data with public and social media data, will become even more complex, and the traditional approaches of having a single source of truth (like the CRM) becomes infeasible.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

BW: It’s a constantly changing environment, with new business services launching every week. It has presented a huge opportunity for us though – and it’s very satisfying to see how our simplified approach on leaving data decentralised but providing a unified profile which has all relevant customer context indexed is helping a lot of companies. There are a lot of companies doing amazing things at the moment, and it’s great to be part of this paradigm shift. The critical challenge is to stay agile and keep solutions adaptable for any forthcoming services which an organization might use or have data stored in.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

BW: We will share our lessons learned from having an increasing number of data sources (and silos) which contained customer data, and why we decided to go for an approach which leaves the original customer data decentralised (yet providing a unified interface to all relevant data).

We will give an outlook on the challenges to come and how the data integration challenges are doing to accelerate in the next years, especially in the Software as a Service space

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

BW: We see an increasing number of companies being aware of the challenges ahead, so for us as an organisation that means an increasing number of companies approaching us rather than us having to reach out to potential customers. We expect the data integration space to tip over in the next years, with companies taking new innovative approaches to data integration than just trying to shove all their data into one database – the number of connectors to be built and the amount of resources required for this will imply not deliver a ROI anymore, starting with small companies and then moving to larger organisations until the end of the decade.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

BW: The change of control over data. A lot of control is given either to consumers, enabling them to change and update their own details or even have certain data deleted, which is great. On the other end, companies are handing control of their data over to outside providers – SaaS companies and services which enrich data or make working with data more convenient, like us. There are a lot of concerns regarding backups and access restrictions, but there are more and more companies which feel comfortable handing over control to an extend for efficiency and data quality gains.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

BW: It’s a big opportunity, but I disagree with the gold rush that’s happening around this buzzword. A lot of software vendors and technology providers started re-branding or re-launching their existing services with a “big data” badge on it.

If you are interested in attending Benjamin’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Monday, April 29, at 5.00pm.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Cédric Carbone, the Chief Technical Officer at Talend.

Cédric will be giving a workshop at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “The Big Challenge of Big Data and Hadoop Integration.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Cédric Carbone on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

Cédric Carbone (CC): My name is Cédric Carbone and I’m Talend’s Chief Technical Officer since its inception in 2006, where I manage the Big Data, Data Integration, Data Quality, MDM and ESB product lines with an international team of more than 140 R&D engineers. I’m also a Board Member at the Eclipse Foundation and OW2 consortium.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

CC: The market wants a 360-degree integration that covers data, process and application integration without forgetting Data Quality which is increasingly becoming an integral part of the solution. Every customer needs a single tool to be able to cover all these needs. One of my main objectives at Talend is to secure the strong integration between our products through an efficient Unify Platform.

Another work focus is Big Data: it is significantly disrupting status quo in the data management market – incumbents are unsuccessfully trying to adapt legacy solutions to deal with this. I spend a lot of time to exchange with our prospects and customers to be sure we develop at Talend the solution that will fill all their Big Data use cases, focusing on profiling, data integration, parsing, data manipulation and data quality. I also have an interest in the merge of ESB and Big Data, to be able to have an easy access to all information stored in a customer’s Big Data cluster.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

CC: Big Data forces a change in your way of thinking! Before the availability of Big Data technology, Business Intelligence teams put their minds together and asked data integration teams for a static DataMart: they knew exactly what they wanted to monitor and knew in advance which were the KPIs as well as the metrics to compute in the BI dashboards.

With Big Data, you collect huge amounts of data to find useful information and interesting connections between data, you didn’t have in mind before. You can then define more efficient KPIs and metrics that come from this new information. By collecting and analyzing all this material, companies gain insight into new business opportunities and threats.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

CC: At Talend, we have decided to go with the market and democratize Big Data by producing our own solution: Talend Open Studio for Big Data. We are providing a powerful and versatile open source Big Data product that makes the job of working with Big Data technologies easy and helps drive and improve business performance.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

CC: In the session at Enterprise Data World, I will be discussing how data integration and data quality tooling can help you in your Big Data project put data inside your Hadoop cluster, parse your unstructured data, do complex data transformation easily, profile your data, cleanse your data and easily access your data stored in a Hadoop cluster thanks to REST or Web Services. All these steps can be done thanks to a graphical tool without writing a line of code and with no knowledge of Map/Reduce.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

CC: Twelve months ago, Big Data projects were only Proof Of Concepts. Now, we have real, live Big Data projects that are going into production with hundreds and even thousands of data nodes.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

CC: As we have previously talked about in this interview, I believe Big Data is the most significant change in Enterprise Data. To go further, it could also be a revolution that can convince companies to remodel their information system.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

CC: More than likely in my job, I should be seeing a growing interest in Big Data solutions and therefore developing products that will be going with the market’s demand. The area has also seen an increase in partnerships and specialized companies: this should be a growing trend in the future. We are also thinking that previous work areas will have less importance, so as a CTO, I will be working on that shift as it happens.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

CC: Data is not only my job, it has been a passion for many years: this is one of the reasons I joined Talend in 2006. Other noteworthy items readers might not know include that I’m an avid traveler: you might see me in an airplane going to Europe (France, Germany, UK…), the United States (mainly California, where we have two offices) and Asia (Beijing). As I’m also a college teacher, I lectured at several universities in the past on technical topics such as XML or Web Services. I have always loved teaching students my work passion!

If you are interested in attending Cédric’s workshops at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Tuesday, April 30, at 10.20am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed George McGeachie.

George will be giving a session at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “Death By Spreadsheet’ – What Is It, and What Can Be Done About It?”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question George McGeachie on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

George McGeachie (GM): Many years have gone by since I was first introduced to IT and data management in general, and data modelling in particular. I initially worked for a UK organisation that was one of the first to offer an integrated modelling and design tool, complete with the ability to generate databases and complete applications. Since then, I’ve worked in a number of different industries, all the while evangelising the good practices I learnt way back when.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

GM: My focus is two-fold currently – earning a living creating quality data models for clients, and providing expertise and training in my favourite data modelling tool, PowerDesigner.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

GM: The importance and nature of metadata (in the widest sense) is better recognised than it ever has been (apart from my first employer, of course).

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

GM: I’m being asked to design data modelling approaches and data models by people who’ve never had them before. I’m also advising clients on the need to integrate the new metadata silos they’re creating, by buying multiple specialist tools.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

GM: My main session shares some of my experiences of ‘Death by Spreadsheet’, and enables participants to share their own experiences – we’re mostly data people, so I’m sure there’ll be a consensus for the ‘right answer’, but you never know. I’m also running a Special Interest Group for PowerDesigner again.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

GM: That’s a tricky one for an independent consultant. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be ‘more of the same’.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

GM: Business and Process Analysts are becoming interested in describing data.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

GM: Increased awareness of the importance of Data Governance, especially definitions and models.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

GM: I co-authored “Data Modeling Made Simple with PowerDesigner” with Steve Hoberman, and I’m working on the second edition – all comments are welcomed. I’m also planning to move my family to Canada from the UK.

If you are interested in attending George’s workshop at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Wednesday, May 1, at 10.30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Gene Boomer, the Manager of Enterprise Data Management at OneAmerica Financial Partners Inc.

Gene will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “Utilizing a Hub-n-Spoke Data Architecture Across the Enterprise.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Gene on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

Gene Boomer (GB): I have been in IT since the mid-80′s and have been in the “data” realm to some degree since the late-80′s.  Got interested in “data” whilst working on my first consulting gig for a large manufacturer…putting together my first DFD’s for a maintenance work order scheduling application developed in COBOL II, CICS, and VSAM (am I dating myself here too much?)  Have touched multiple data platforms over the years such as TOTAL, SUPRA, dBase, Paradox, FileMaker, FoxPro, Access, ObjectStar, MySQL, DB2, UDB, Oracle, SQL Server.  And have utilized numerous data design methodologies put forth by the likes of Codd (duh!), Chen, Yourdon, Martin, Inmon, Kimball, Marco, Silverston, Zachman.

I have worked for a handful of consulting firms over the years and have held a “real” job at OneAmerica for the past seven years in the role as Enterprise Data Architect along with being a member of the architecture team reporting to our VP – Enterprise Architecture.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

GB:  As the Enterprise Data Architect for OneAmerica, I am responsible for establishing and shepherding implementation of our overall enterprise data strategy (EDS) throughout the company.  I also manage a team of seven who are responsible for certain disciplines covering multiple components of the DM-BOK such as Data Architecture, Modeling, Storage, Integration, Reference Data, DW & BI, Metadata, and Quality.  This team is responsible for the effective utilization of our database, ETL, ESB, hub-n-spoke, and BI reporting environments across the company.  We are also responsible for guidelines and standards surrounding data modeling, design, integration, services, and reporting.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

GB:  For OneAmerica there are two items that are affecting change within the company. The first is that we are currently going through an outsourcing effort of our infrastructure to an off-site vendor.  The migration has been a bit painful at times and we are working to stabilize our application environments.  This brings into play the second item of change, which is the culture, as with any organization, the corporate culture grows organically over the years and can become entrenched.  So, when you ‘move the cheese’ on people, you encounter various reactions and have to address new types of situations.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

GB:  For my team and myself, we have to be careful about putting forth too much change with regards to the EDS so we follow the old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.  We look to this approach when consulting/collaborating with the various application areas across the company as well as participating on the numerous Business plan projects sponsored by our three main lines of business.  We take advantage of our participation on these efforts to introduce little ‘nuggets’ of the EDS, it makes for slow progress but it is progress none the less.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

GB:  I am going to talk about our Hub-n-Spoke data architecture that we have implemented here at OneAmerica. The project initially started out as a MDM-related effort but evolved into an overall data sharing environment.  One of our major issues is dealing with all the point-to-point interfaces between many of our Admin Systems and the maintenance headaches that approach produces…not to mention the scalability issue with point-to-points.  We initially established a central hub that we call EDR (Enterprise Data Repository) and introduced the concepts of ‘contributors’ and ‘subscribers’ to EDR.  The idea was to look to EDR as our Trusted Source of enterprise content.  We established common subject area data models and common ETL patterns to move content through the plumbing.  Hopefully someone out there can make use of the understanding and knowledge we gained by going through this process.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?

GB:  The past 12 months have been spent balancing the infrastructure outsourcing effort along with moving forward on the EDS among various Business plan projects.

DV: How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

GB:  I expect to move a little more aggressively with our EDS and have move involvement and collaboration with our application areas and Business teams.  Would also like to formalize a data governance program.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

GB:  I believe that all the ‘new’ connectivity approaches that lead to creation and sharing of disparate data (social media, mobile devices, IP to anything) present challenges to data management professionals with regards to content volume, structure, access, and mostly…data security.  The concept of all this RA / WA (read anywhere / write anywhere) sounds good until the realization sets in that there requires strong governance to keep the inevitable chaos at bay.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

GB: At the moment I am trying to figure out exactly where Big Data fits within OneAmerica and our overall EDS…we do not naturally process “gobs and gobs” of data on a daily basis.  And even though our potential vendor’s marketing folks attempt to tell us that Big Data is more than just indexing/searching giga….wait, tera…wait, petabytes of data all I can see through the clouds is that Big Data is just indexing/searching giga….wait, tera…wait, petabytes of data.  Of course, I could just be completely Small Minded here regarding Big Data…

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

GB:  Had it not been for my high school guidance counselor I most likely would not have made the trek into IT…I was attending a vocational high school studying electronics and the counselor suggested trying for the Computer & Info Sciences BS degree at The Ohio State University…the rest, as they say, is history…

If you are interested in attending Gene’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The presentation is on Thursday, May 2, at 8.30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed SnapLogic, an industry innovator in Cloud integration technologies.

SnapLogic is an Exhibitor at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013.

The Sponsor Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Speaker Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question SnapLogic on their current work and history within the industry, with particular importance on the products and/or services being highlighted at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about you and your company (e.g. brief history, industry focus, primary product line etc.)?

SnapLogic: SnapLogic is the leader in Enterprise Cloud Integration, dramatically simplifying and accelerating how companies integrate enterprise and SaaS apps in the cloud. Our company was founded in 2006 and one of our early investors was Gaurav Dhillon, who joined as our CEO in 2009. Our primary product is the SnapLogic Integration Platform, a scalable enterprise integration hub with a browser-based drag and drop visual designer and a rich library of connectors called Snaps.

DV: What’s your company elevator pitch?

SnapLogic: In short, SnapLogic allows you to connect data wherever it is (cloud or on-premises), in any format (big, mobile or real-time), to any application (SaaS or enterprise). Our intelligent connectors, or Snaps, integrate 10 times faster and 6 times more cost effectively than traditional integration tools.

DV: What will you be highlighting or showcasing at EDW? Are you planning any product releases or announcements this year at Enterprise Data World?

SnapLogic: We will be showcasing our newly unveiled Big Data-as-a-Service solution and the latest release of our integration platform. Leveraging new Cloudera certification, SnapLogic’s Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) solution provides not only data access but also data logging for Hadoop – simplifying the process of building a cluster to run on Hadoop and getting that data into business intelligence tools. SnapLogic’s new Spring release helps enterprises improve data provisioning among SaaS and on-premises apps with a series of product enhancements, such as a new management console, expanded support for unstructured data streams, and the ability to establish private enterprise SnapStores.

DV: What’s the unique selling proposition of your product or service versus your competitors?  What do you do that nobody else does (or better than anyone else)?

SnapLogic: Data integration is typically a long, expensive process requiring months of planning and cumbersome hand coding. No other company slashes the time and effort required to integrate multiple data sources to just days, as we do with our Snaps. Our SnapStore features 150+ Snaps, which are modular collections of integration components built for a specific application or data source, such as Salesforce, SAP, Splunk, Birst, Oracle, etc. Snaps free organizations from vendor lock-in by shielding end users from integration complexity.

DV: Why should the Enterprise Data World attendees stop by your booth this year?

SnapLogic: The data integration market is ripe for disruption, and that has important implications for data scientists and data integration professionals. Attendees should stop by SnapLogic’s booth to learn how to improve their business insights and agility by easily combining structured and unstructured information on-premises and in the cloud.

In addition, we invite anyone interested in data integration to attend our session on Wednesday, May 1^st from 9:30am – 10:00am: “Don’t Lose the Data Battle Before it Even Begins.”

DV: What do you see as the most significant trend happening at this time within the Data Management industry?

SnapLogic: Sensored devices are generating massive volumes of data to be gathered, moved and analyzed, posing a challenge for all kinds of organizations – from retailers to manufacturers. This and other machine data is generating exabytes of helpful customer and supply chain information that is not fully utilized. Meanwhile, legacy data still offers tremendous insight about historical business trends and needs to be consumed alongside new forms of data from SaaS apps, social media and machines.

DV: How is this going to affect your particular business focus?   How does your product/service address that trend?

SnapLogic: The demand for greater access to Big Data will drive greater demand for SnapLogic. With the variety, velocity and volume of big data that’s part of today’s information architecture, and the potential for big data to feed other systems, integration has become a top priority. Our solution enables companies to perform complex data integrations very quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. The SnapLogic Integration Platform makes it simple for anyone, not just data scientists, to integrate both unstructured and flat files, Hadoop clusters and data warehouses, as well as real time and batch data.

DV: What’s the next thing that your company will be working on in its products?

SnapLogic: We have a vision for enterprise cloud integration, and our vision is unfolding this year through a series of new product innovations targeted at solving the most compelling integration problems of distributed computing – including partnerships and solutions like Big Data-as-a-Service.  Stay tuned for more on how we’re extending our platform to meet any SaaS orchestration need.

DV: What is something noteworthy or uniquely interesting about your company that most attendees and readers may not know about, but that you would like them to know?

SnapLogic: Our CEO Gaurav Dhillon pioneered the enterprise data integration industry when he started Informatica – now a $4 billion publicly traded company – twenty years ago. Gaurav was Informatica’s first employee and CEO for more than 12 years, leading the company from a startup idea in his garage to a leading software enterprise with customers and operations around the world. An early investor in SnapLogic, Gaurav joined as our CEO in 2009 when he saw the tremendous potential for our cloud and on-premise integration products, strategy, and unique business model. Under Gaurav’s leadership, SnapLogic’s products are now used by several prominent enterprises in the Global 2000, including Bloomin’ Brands (Outback Steakhouse), Best Buy, Activision, Netflix, ING, Pandora and Fusion-io.

If you are interested in more information about sponsors and exhibitors at EDW2013 see the full listing at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/sponsors.cfm

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Peter A. Marotta, the Enterprise Data Administrator (EDM) at Verisk Analytics.

Peter will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The workshop is titled “Data Management in Insurance – from Data Creation and Acquisition to Business Intelligence and Analytics.” He is presenting with Tracy Spadola, the Practice Lead for Insurance Industry Consulting at Teradata.

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Peter on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his workshop at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession)?

Peter A. Marotta (PM): I was a math major in college. Graduated with a BS in Math and my first job out of college was as an actuarial student for a workers’ compensation data collection organization. Didn’t do well with actuarial exams but actuaries are high-end data users. So my career transitioned from an actuarial student to a data manager – most of my career is in the property and casualty insurance industry but as my company expands to other markets, I’m now also involved with healthcare, finance, mortgage and retail data. My current role is leading Verisk Analytics’ (a leading source of information about risk) enterprise data management activities.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

PM: The Enterprise Data Management group that I lead is focused on documenting the enterprise’s data assets and intellectual property, exploring new methods for acquiring new and different data, supporting business unit plans, providing a secure environment for research and development, and defining enterprise data strategies.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

PM: Keeping up with the ever expanding amount of data – available and desired and most importantly making sense of these data – that is, assessing its potential value.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

PM: Much higher visibility and much greater demands for data.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

PM: We will discuss what makes insurance unique when it comes to data and data management – data is the lifeblood of the insurance industry – and how lessons learned by the insurance industry can be valuable to other industries.

DV: How have your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

PM: Increased involvement with non-traditional data sources being applied to traditional and non-traditional business problems – the impact of climate change on insurance risk, for example – and how to triage the ever increasing types and amount of data sources to identify those of the greatest potential value. Data.gov alone has over 375,000 datasets.

As for the next year or two, I see our activities evolving from researching and documenting data assets to creating tools and data stores which facilitate access and use. Also there is increased availability and use of unstructured data – imagery (photo, satellite, video, etc.), social media, electronic health records, etc. – a challenge to all data managers is how to manage and derive useful information from this data.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

PM: Repurposing/reusing of data beyond its original intended use. For example, automobile telematics data used for insurance pricing, and weather data to identify potential cases of insurance fraud. Reuse and repurposing put a higher premium on good metadata and greatly complicate the testing of the quality of data.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

PM: The insurance, healthcare and financial industries which my company serves have always been big data sources and users – the biggest change is not with the amount of data but rather with disparate sources of data and more significantly the number of new data users, many of whom have limited data management and analytical skills.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

PM: This is a tough one. Beyond spending time with family and friends, my likes are travel, classic movies and cooking. I’m a prolific newspaper reader – at least 5 a day – that is, while newspapers still exist. I’m a born and bred New Yorker growing up in Greenwich Village in the 60’s and 70’s – but to protect the innocent can’t elaborate any further in writing.

If you are interested in attending Peter and Tracy’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Monday, April 29, at 6:00pm.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Bob Schork, a Metadata Architect and Associate Director/Program Manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions.

Bob will be giving a workshop at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The workshop is titled “Categorizing Enterprise Metadata for Integration.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Bob on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his workshop at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience, and how you got started in the data profession?

Bob Schork: I have about 20 years of Metadata experience at the Enterprise Level, But, I started out as a Systems Analyst/ Developer, then was a DBA, Data Architect/Modeler and most recently have been learning Enterprise Architecture. This has allowed me to obtain a unique perspective as to what is needed and what will and won’t work Architecture wise. Currently I work for Cognizant at Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of NJ developing their Metadata Strategy. But, as so often happens, I am consulted on several other capabilities as well.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

Bob Schork: Integrating all of the Corporations metadata into the Corporate Metadata Repository.  It is something that I have done in the past, but I was attracted to the fact that this is such a clean slate, it should be relatively easy to implement this strategy.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

Bob Schork: Lack of knowledge as to what can and cannot be done with metadata.  A lot of times I get called in to other companies and they have a concept of merging Data and Metadata in a Metadata Repository that will not work.  They got the idea either from the vendor that sold them the product or a well-meaning former employee who really did not know metadata.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

Bob Schork: It makes metadata a “Hard Sell”.  After all, if John/Mary could not make it work, what makes you think that an outside consultant can do it?  When upon further review they either tried to “Boil the Ocean” or did not have the Metamodeling skills to perform the task. It does get frustrating when I hear statements like this, because I don’t think metadata was given a good chance to succeed. Another problem is that Metadata Governance is never addressed, that is a big problem.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing and the benefits the audience will obtain).

Bob Schork: First let me say that Enterprise Data World is the place for Data Professionals.  I think I’ve missed maybe 3 EDWs in the last 12 years.  What I really want to convey is the belief that Enterprise Data Assets/Business terms can be used in order to drill down to the physical data layer with Traceability.  Now, there is a lot of work to do that and introducing my 3-tiered approach can help them implement this at their company.  One complaint I always hear is that no one knows what their data means.  My presentation will show them how they can gather the Application and Subject Area definitions, and how you can use that to integrate up to the Enterprise level, using the information that you have already.

DV: How have your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

Bob Schork: Well, I am new to my current position, but in my last position, I developed a process of extracting Operational process model information, integrating that with a data modeling tool and then feeding the logical terms back into the process model for use in the Application level process models.  As far as the future, I know that we can implement the same thing at my current location.  But even beyond that, I think that AFTER we get the metadata settled in the Repository, then we can begin to integrate the data with that to create some interesting reports.  That may be a future EDW Workshop.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

Bob Schork: I think that corporations are finally waking up to the fact that it is very useful.  Not only as a reference, but also as a means of reuse, integration, and reporting. Think of this; if I wanted to find out where all my Accounts were in my organization, I can either have 5 Business Analyst work for a week to find just what and where they are located.  Or, I can look in the Repository and find out that Subject Area 1 has 5 Accounts, Subject Area 2 has 15 Accounts, etc.   Not only that, I can drill sown to tell you what applications use what account, who the steward is and where the data is located in a matter of minutes. That is real processing power.  I think that people have finally realized that the Silver Bullet does not exist and you have to do the work in order to be successful. But Governance is a big key.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

Bob Schork: It is not.  We are not even at the place of researching this yet.  But in my view Big Data is not as broad range as it was first trumpeted.  I think it is good for reports but I think it has a long way to go to be used for detail processing. I’d rather put those funds into SOA, because I see Web Applications growing in the future.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

Bob Schork: I can get very detailed if we need to, because I’ve actually done what I propose. We will also dissect a Metadata Specialist job position and point out the pitfalls that they may encounter at that position. Since Metadata is one of those skills that will assist the attendees in opening up the rest of Enterprise Data Management, no question is off based.
If you are interested in attending Bob’s workshop at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Monday, April 29, at 1:30pm.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.