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 existing backup vendors

20:40 -- Use cases of backup

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

* 18:00 — How Alluxio helps data engineers

* 21:00 — Alluxio use cases

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 importance of the portfolio approach to cybersecurity