Humans of Data

Last few editions of the TheDigitalAgenda (TDA ) newsletter have dealt with rapid advancements in spacial computing AR/VR technology, AI Agents and Digital Twin use cases and technology and we even highlighted GenAI's impact on an industry (movie making). Amidst all technology hoopla, I felt we need to not forget those whose creativity and innovations have enriched the world. Yes, I want us to consider the Human Factor in this edition. Since the last newsletter, I have attended or spoken at several industry events and conferences and met a number of remarkable folks. So I will highlight a few of those here today.

What is a Data Superconnector?

Data gives you superpowers. ?The data industry landscape has been evolving over my past 3 decades of involvement but has changed considerably in the last year and a half. AI has become a real thing, with all enterprises realizing that AI techniques can add a lot of value to their businesses.? Large language model showdown continues with a cacophony of announcements and amazing advancements every week? amongst the GenAI big daddys.? AI needs data, and all data companies are realizing that AI can upend their market.

Whether it's unicorn startups, scaleups, public companies or VC firms - they have one thing in common. All rely on data for operational survival and long range planning. Strategic insights hidden in piles of historic internal data and streams of fast arriving transactional data across channels & customer touch points combined with external data source augmentation give them competitive advantage.?

From finding a cure for cancer to landing on Mars, data teams will power some of the greatest achievements of humankind. But anyone who's worked with data knows how chaotic it can be especially if you are dealing with enterprise data. Not only data engineers or data architects, but the future belongs to all the humans of data. ?And even more to those who are “data superconnectors”.?

Data “superconnectors” are humans whose roles are akin to superconductors in the chip industry.?You can call them data superheroes as well!

While I tend to connect with and showcase work of my accomplished co-workers,clients or those who have been my longtime mentors as part of?the TDA podcasts, in this edition of the TDA newsletter,? highlighting 10 individuals who I met or reconnected with in the last month.

OK, so who are these and why are these Data Superheros?

TL;DR More details about each of them and their work follows but here are the names In the order of the pictures appearing in the poster above:

1. Prukalpa Sankar 2. Sanjeev Mohan 3. Shailvi Wkhlu 4. Dr Anand Deshpande

5. Ravit Jain 6. Dr Amr Awdallah 7. Kashif Mehdi 8. Dhruba Borthakur

9. Marissa Schmidt 10. Aishwarya Srinivasan

To learn why each of these superconnectors are data superheroes and their backstory, do read on!

1 Prukalpa Sankar, CEO of Atlan

Atlan,? a data startup that has recently raised $105M as part of its Series C funding is a data workspace that helps different types of users, such as business, data, and IT professionals, collaborate on data assets. It's an active metadata platform that offers a scalable way to secure data while also democratizing it. Atlan's capabilities include: Granular access control, Data democratization, Metadata activation, Two-way movement of metadata, and AI capabilities.?

Why is Prukalpa a data superhero ?

The petite co-founder of Atlan, is a young engineering entrepreneur that you are likely to underestimate at first glance. Prukalpa ? previously founded SocialCops, world leading “data for good” company winning awards such as New York Times Global Visionary and? World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer amongst many others.?

I interacted with her a couple of years ago when on behalf of a client, we were evaluating? metadata and governance platforms. I walked into Snowflake Expo at the Snowflake summit recently and found her smiling at the Atlan booth there. A quick conversation and catch up later, I was convinced she’s a Data Superhero who needs to be highlighted in my newsletter. Besides being a TED speaker, and a Linkedin top voice,? she’s been awarded several accolades including Economic Times Emerging Entrepreneur for the Year, Forbes 30 under 30, Fortune 40 under 40 and Top 10 CNBC Young Business Women 2016?

2 Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo ( Ex- Gartner Research VP)?

SanjMo is an independent analyst & advisory service firm that Sanjeev Mohan started a couple of years ago after over 3 decades in the industry including as an Analyst VP at Gartner.?

Why is Sanjeev?a data superhero?

Known for his sharp analysis and direct talk, Sanjeev hosts a podcast by the name? “It Depends” in a nod to his management consulting days. He is a prolific blogger and author whose pen and voice is valued for critically analyzing tech vendors in the data and analytics space. When not creating content or appearing on live analyst commentary shows at big tech conferences, he spends his days?speaking at conferences and vendor events where he gets VIP treatment as an invited guest. After years of following his posts, I serendipitously met him at an event hosted by NTT in San Francisco last month and discovered more common ground between us that you can read in my post here.?

3 Shailvi Wakhlu, Author, Investor and Independent consultant (ex Head of Data at Strava)?

Author of "Self-Advocacy", Shailvi Wakhlu lends her voice as a speaker, and data science & analytics consultant these days after having had a 15+ year career in corporate world in the domain of data and analytics including at Salesforce and Fitbit (now part of? Google)

Why is Shailvi? a data superhero?

I came across a recording of her session on self advocacy where she was encouraging individuals to speak up and get their worth at work. This way, she? helps companies build empowered and productive teams by leveraging Self-Advocacy. After an introductory call, we reconnected IRL at a conference for engineering leaders last year where she was conducting a roundtable and then found her to be speaking at the same conference as me? API & AI World. She was speaking on “preventing, diagnosing and curing bad data” We met recently on the sidelines of Snowflake Summit at its Dev day soaking in the latest in the world of Data & AI? Cloud. ? Shailvi has been a prolific speaker, mentor and course creator on several platforms. I have seen her uplift other data analytics and engineering professionals especially women and convinced of her capabilities as a data leader and superpowers as a data superhero!

4 Dr Anand Deshpande, Founder & Chairman, Persistent Systems

Founded in 1990, Persistent Systems is a global services and solutions company delivering Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization. With 268% growth since 2020, Persistent is the fastest-growing Indian IT Services brand now employing over 24000 technologists across 21 countries

Why is Anand? a data superhero?

Dr. Anand Deshpande , the Founder & Chairman of Persistent? is a true technology visionary having deep? interest in database technologies since his PhD days.? In 2023, he received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year? Award in the Services Category for his pioneering role in the Solution provider category and has served numerous positions at various professional and non-profit organizations including Computer History Museum, NASSCOM, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India and? Software Exporters’ Association.?

After transitioning from the role of CEO at Persistent, Anand is committed to making a broader impact and is focused on data, higher education, and entrepreneurship. He is a part-time member of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a trustee of the VLDB Foundation, and is actively working on projects to create a data platform for Indian patients suffering from cancer and diabetes.? Talking about VLDB (Very Large Data Base), he has been involved in their conferences around the world for a couple of decades bringing academicians, researchers and practitioners of database technologies together for annual exchange of ideas and deep technical paper presentations.

It was a pleasure to reconnect with Anand Deshpande after 15 years reminiscing about my visit to Persistent Systems HQ in Pune during my IBM tenure. That time I was scaling a Global Analytics & Big Data team & big services business across our delivery centers in emerging markets like China, Brazil & India. We remembered old common friends ( IBM & IIT Alumni ) from the world of databases at IBM Software & Research. Anand's humility despite earning so many industry awards & accolades and transition into Chairman role & driving philanthropy is exemplary. I wrote about this in my post after meeting him last week here.

5 Ravit Jain, Host & Founder, The Ravit Show

The mission of The Ravit Show is to illuminate the intersection of media and technology by engaging with Data and AI leaders. With a focus on new business development and compelling communication,? they have? established a platform that resonates with industry professionals and enthusiasts alike. They are dedicated to sharing knowledge, driving conversations, and creating meaningful connections within the tech community, with a special emphasis on Data and AI. It was born 4 years ago during the pandemic.

Why is Ravit?a data superhero?

Ravit is a bundle of energy. A graduate of IIM, Indore, he leverages his expertise in B2B influence to foster thought leadership and community building.? I first interacted with him when he was at Packt Publishing and I was organizing the AI Summit for ASEI (American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin) . I have admired his energetic webinars and live interview episodes with data leaders, many of whom are my old time friends. After several years of virtual exchanges, I ran into him in full action at the Incorta conference in San Francisco last month. He has been covering a lot of tech shows lately as an invited? media partner which?helps build community. Recently he was also named a Linkedin Influencer/Top Voice. His infectious smile and unique style of building Data community?makes him a data superhero!

6 Dr Amr Avdallah,? CEO & Co-founder, Vectara?

Vectara is an end-to-end Retrieval Augmented Generation as-a-Service (RAGaaS) platform that empowers product builders to embed powerful Generative AI features into their applications with extraordinary results. Built on a solid hybrid search core, Vectara delivers the shortest path to an answer or action through a safe, secure, and trusted entry point essentially to overcome the hallucination problems that current GenAI Large Language Models suffer from.?

Why is Amr a data superhero ?

I interacted with Amr Awadallah first time when Cloudera was a small startup located in a stripmall in Palo Alto in 2008-2009 timeframe. They had put together a panel discussion with Ralph Kimball that was my main reason to attend. Those from the legacy Data Warehousing world may remember him from Bill Inmon v/s Kimball methodology that I spent countless hours debating with peers 30 years ago. Bill Inmon is widely considered as the “Father of the Data Warehouse” while Ralph Kimball is regarded as a fierce proponent of Data Marts.?(I had hosted TheDigitalAgenda podcast episode #2 with Bill Inmon last year)

?Fast forward a few years during the peak of?Hadoop distribution wars (Hortonworks/ Cloudera/ MapR/ BigInsights), I reached out on behalf of IBM Global Consulting for a partnership. We committed tonnes of resources to build Cloudera technical consulting & implementation capabilities and GTM motions in addition to exploring deeper technical integrations. Finally, we were able to launch IBM Big Data Analytics COE with skills across multiple Hadoop distributions and later on added Spark from Databricks to the mix.

I continued to see Amr on the O'reilly Hadoop World conference circuit nationwide as well as other forums in silicon valley. Last year, after a gap of 8 years (during which he had finished up a short stint at Google after Cloudera and founded Vectara), I met Amr at a small CXO gathering talking about RAG and reducing hallucinations and other problems with LLMs. His style of presentation had not changed - only he had greyed a bit. And then I saw him again at the Incorta conference last month where he delivered a speech right after a 18 hour flight landing straight from the middle east.

Amr has consistently pushed for innovation in Big Data (he was part of the OG Hadoop engineering? at Yahoo that led to creation of the Big Data industry) and now he's deep into the AI world and folks simply love his powerful presentation style. For that, I consider him the OG data superhero.

7. Kashif Mehdi, VP of Growth at Data Galaxy?

DataGalaxy started off as a data catalog but it has evolved into. so much more than that. It? is an organizational data management hub offering the first platform dedicated to active metadata mapping, management, and knowledge-sharing for people across all company teams.??

Why is Kash a data superhero ?

Kash Mehdi (Kashif or Kash) as he's fondly known in his close circle, was born and completed his engineering degree in Hyderabad, India. I got to see him in action as the young & dynamic student ambassador from University of Arkansas, Little Rock (UALR)? at a data quality & governance conference organized by? International association for information & data quality(IAIDQ) when he was pursuing his MS at UALR. I served on the industry non-profit (IAIDQ) board where his professor Dr John Talburt was an Advisor.

Fast forward a decade, Kash had graduated and weaving through a variety of roles of increasing responsibilities across Collabera & Informatica, he now serves as the VP of Growth at DataGalaxy. I got invited to a CDO Masterclass cohort last year that he was launching as part of his job. We interacted briefly then via zoom during the Masterclass last year but it was a joy to find him in my neck of the woods during the Snowflake Summit earlier this month. We finally met in person after a 11 years gap!?

Kash is always brimming with ideas. He started the CDO academy at Informatica in his last job to upskill the next generation of data executives and has recently been acknowledged as a LinkedIn Community Top voice for Data Governance.

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8 Dhruba Borthakur, Cofounder & CTO Rockset

Rockset is a serverless realtime indexing database that delivers millisecond-latency SQL on raw, semi-structured data, without any ETL. Rockset enables developers to build decision-making applications like personalization engines, gaming leaderboards, IoT apps and vision AI-based automation that wants to leverage large data sets. It can search through billions of records that contain numbers, vectors, geo-points, text, etc in a few milliseconds. The index that powers this search can scale to trillions of records. With Rockset several highly visible scalable architectures in the industry have been built including Netflix personalized homepage, LinkedIn feed infra and Uber Eats used it in their two tower embeddings.

If that was too technical, let me state in layman terms. With the proliferation of AI into the mainstream, on one hand, AI model building tech companies need data to grow their knowledge base so that they can make their AI models more intelligent and be useful to humanity. And then there are the second set of traditional data companies who store reams of your enterprise data to power business-analytics and applications. And they want AI models to be able to leverage this data to power intelligent assistants and agents. And when you want to serve AI queries for your enterprise data set, you need a SEARCH database.? And Rockset has been building a search and indexing database since inception. So its a real time streaming analytical? database product.

Why is Dhruba a data superhero?

What deep techie that this tall mild mannered gentleman Dhruba Borthakur is would only be evident if you have either worked with him or seen him giving talks and interacting with customers.

I knew him from his work on Hadoop File system (HFS) and Hbase and RocksDB at Facebook during the heydays of Hadoop (Remember the big data hype a decade back? ) when I led IBM’s Worldwide Big Data Center of Excellence over 15 years ago and interacted with the OGs of Hadoop. One of the panel discussions that I helped organize (and spoke at TiE Silicon Valley) featured Dhruba when I first interacted with him. Dhruba continued his open source? committer and PMC role at the Apache software foundation ever since and then co-founded Rockset.

Then last year, I got an invite to the inaugural “Index” conference where I reconnected with him and learnt about Rockset and how customers are using it. We met again at last month’s second Index conference at the Computer History Museum and caught up on the latest. This past week, I was happy to note that OpenAI, the big daddy of AI, is acquiring Dhruba’s company.

Congrats Dhruba and the entire Rockset team for a wonderful culmination after? years of startup? sweat and toil!

9 Marissa Schmidt, Sr Director, Gartner

?Gartner is a top tier Analyst firm that delivers objective insight to executives and their teams.? Founded over 4 decades ago, Gartner has operations in 85 countries with 20,000 associates? around the world. They? guide the leaders who shape the world in almost every major area of an organization. Apart from publishing the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Hype Cycle, they do a lot of consulting and commissioned position papers and reports. A favorable? positioning entry with respect to competition?into the Gartner Magic Quadrant is often considered a golden ticket to furthering business or funding/M&A? prospects for any company/startup.

Why is Marissa a data superhero?

Marissa Schmidt is a Senior Director at Garter covering a few areas including cloud networking, GenAI/Appsecurity, working with product mgmt/portfolio leaders in the industry for product positioning, strategy, pricing and differentiations. Her insights conveyed in creative and compelling ways by leveraging intimate knowledge of specific market segments, target customers, and product enable clients to formulate? their long-term strategies. Though she is? relatively new to Gartner, having joined them 18 months ago, Marisaa is not new to the cloud and data industry.

The intersection of Cybersecurity and GenAI is very interesting to me and when I recently saw her presenting to a room full of CXOs and senior industry executives, and gained some new insights from the research data presented, I wanted to have a deeper conversation. Learned how GenAI is being used by attackers in the ever evolving threat landscape and how to prepare to defend including Automated Moving Target Defence (AMTD)

10 Aishwarya Srinivasan, Sr AI Advocate, Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups, formerly known as Microsoft BizSpark, is a Microsoft initiative that provides support, Azure cloud credits, and free licenses to selected Microsoft products, which are then also provided to software entrepreneurs and start-ups,providing the benefits and the perks to the selected members of this program for a term of 3 years.

Why is Aishwarya a data superhero?

Aishwarya Srinivasan currently works in the Microsoft for Startups group within Microsoft to help startups build machine learning solutions, leveraging core Microsoft/OpenAI products. Prior to this, Aishwarya was working as a Data Scientist at Google Cloud and before that,? as an AI & ML Innovation Leader at IBM? where she was working cross-functionally with the Data & AI? product team, data science team and sales to research AI use-cases for clients.

I first heard about this young graduate newhire IBMer from Columbia university a few years after I had left IBM but noticed her making waves via her data science content and social media posts. Subsequently, I recently met her at a Microsoft for startups event in Mountain View and we caught up. Glad to note?that she’s now moved?to her new home in my hometown of?Fremont!

She is also?the founder of Illuminate AI, first of its kind non-profit organization for providing resources and mentorship for people who want to build their career in the field of AI. She is an advocate for open-source technologies, such as Deepchecks, PyTorch Lightning and Scikit Learn.

For her side hustle, Aishwarya is a prolific data science and AI content creator with over half a million followers on Linkedin alone. Known as the “datasciencegal” on? Instagram, she has almost 50K followers there too. She recently published a book “What’s your worth” and has been awarded numerous awards including Linkedin TopVoices for several years in a row. She’s also received Trailblazer of the Year award from Women in AI in 2022 and Women of Influence by Business Journal in 2022.? Despite her young age, she has a lot of accomplishments already under her belt including a patent and gets invited to paid speaking gigs often. She’s clearly?a data superhero and inspiration to a lot of folks, especially youth in STEM, Data Science and AI.

Call to action: So where do we go from here ?

While I've highlighted only 10 smart humans of data that i met in the past month, there are plenty more that continue to inspire me and I shall continue to highlight those in my regular posts. Till then here are few CTAs:

1. Suggest you follow and check out work of each of these superheroes via Linkedin and other social platforms
2. Who's your favourite superhero from this above list?
3. Who else should I connect with and possibly invite to a podcast?

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