Inside Insights: Hybrid Cloud Data Warehouses with Matt Florian

In this episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with Matt Florian of Comerit on how enterprises can leverage hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions. Matt shares the value of hybrid solutions, how to approach creating a hybrid solution, and lessons he's learned along the way. His key takeaway: focus on flexibility and resiliency in your data architecture so you can create data products that can answer multiple questions. 

Matt has more than 25 years of leadership in data and enterprise architecture in numerous industries. He has successfully delivered enterprise data transformation projects for government, telecommunication, retail, manufacturing, and financial services sectors.

Matt began consulting focusing on data warehousing in telecommunication for national providers. Over the course of his career has consulted for Oracle, IBM, and Unisys across many industries. His leadership, experience, and clarity of technical topics earned him the trust of client executive leadership. Matt’s talent to develop and lead teams is the key to his successful delivery of projects for clients.

Connect with Us:
LinkedIn:

Matt Florian

Mustansir Saifuddin

Innovative Solution Partners 

Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin
YouTube

or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation. 
 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:03.010] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this second episode of a multipart series, I welcome back Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt and I discuss the value of hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions, including how to approach creating one, and lessons learned along the way. It's more than about just getting it in place.

 

[00:00:35.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Hello, Matt. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. How are you, man?

 

[00:00:39.130] - Matt Florian

I'm doing very well Mustansir. How are you, sir?

 

[00:00:42.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Another beautiful day. Hey, thank you for our first conversation when we started off this whole cloud data warehouse topic, and I'd like to continue our discussion on this topic. And I think one area that I feel a lot of conversations are happening is the hybrid environment. So I thought we should talk about that in today's session and wanted to get your take on that.

 

[00:01:15.190] - Matt Florian

Oh, absolutely. It's a very common conversation that goes on with clients nowadays and trying to figure out what is it that they really want to go do and how much risk they want to carry on it. You'll hear hybrid pop up there every time. So I think one of the biggest problems they have is what the heck does hybrid need?

 

[00:01:34.090] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Yeah, I hear you, and I think this will be really helpful, especially with your experience. And when you look at across the board, doesn't matter what industry you're in, it seems like customers are not ready to make that jump. Right. They are looking at ways to either extend their environments into a way that they can sustain in the short term and then plan for the long term.

 

[00:02:01.710] - Matt Florian

Right.

 

[00:02:01.930] - Mustansir Saifuddin

So this conversation would be very beneficial.

 

[00:02:05.820] - Matt Florian

I completely agree.

 

[00:02:08.890] - Mustansir Saifuddin

All right, so let's start with this. Let's start with a very basic thing. I think I would like to have my listeners get an understanding of when we talk about hybrid. What do you really mean and why hybrid? I think those two questions I like to start with.

 

[00:02:24.580] - Matt Florian

Sure. You think of hybrid. Hybrid's about taking two options that are very similar to each other. They have overlapping functionality and saying.

 

[00:02:40.720] - Matt Florian

I want the safety and security of what I've been doing, but I want to start dabbling into another way to do it. And we see that a lot with SAP customers who have a lot of security inside of being inside of BW, and then maybe they want to dabble over into cloud computing with Snowflake. And how do you do that? There's different ways that looks at you. Same thing we said, like the security of SAC, but maybe I want to use Power Bi or Sigma or something like that and balance it out, but don't extend their risk and just jump and go do it. So SAP customers don't tend to be risk heavy. They like to avert it as much as possible.

 

[00:03:32.590] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely. And that makes sense, right? Especially when you have big landscapes and you want to manage your environment, what's the best way to do it? Right? So I guess I heard two things right, and I'm talking about benefits. It seems like you want to avoid risk as much as possible. At the same time try out new technology. Are there any other benefits that you see from your viewpoint when you take a hybrid approach?

 

[00:04:01.310] - Matt Florian

So the hybrid is a benefit to using hybrid is that you get to focus on a particular use case that is of value and benefit to you. And I often see customers go down that hybrid because they want to go and have more flexibility to blend SAP data with other third party data and do it just easier. And so they'll go down this hybrid approach because, well, let's face it, BW does a lot of analytics well and don't break what's really working well for you. On the other hand, wanting to know your organic growth against other metrics that come from Salesforce or other CRMs or from Google Analytics, that's a whole other dimension. And that's hybrid really can help bridge that and be able to answer some questions that SAP doesn't answer easily.

 

[00:05:04.990] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Absolutely, I think so. You use the SAP reference over here, right? So I guess I'll come from that angle now. So I'm an SAP customer. Why would I want to think about a hybrid solution? And I believe you kind of dabbled into the answer, but give some examples that you can think of where an SAP customer would like to go the route of hybrid.

 

[00:05:31.390] - Matt Florian

So a couple of immediate use cases where hybrid can come into play and really help out is let's go with archiving and being able to look at archived data along with live data. Archiving into a cloud database is one option for archiving either a system that you've migrated off and you did a brownfield implementation. So you have historical data sitting in one place and all your new data building up in another. S/4HANA sitting over here, and you want to bring that together. Well, hybrid is a good option for bringing and looking at historical data along with your current transactions. So that's one area that you may want to go and dabble in. Another good use case is that you really want to implement machine learning and AI, and you want to watch streams of data and you want to train data models for machine learning. Well, that's a hybrid approach gives just a wide open ecosystem of tools that you can use for machine learning and AI, and it would really be beneficial. Again, just easier, for sure.

 

[00:06:57.240] - Mustansir Saifuddin

No, I like your examples. I think kind of puts things in perspective, right? I mean, especially like I said, if things are working, you don't want to break it. At the same time, how can I bring in new ideas, new technology, or new approaches to make my environment easier to maintain and maybe more future proof as far as where I want to go in the long run, right?

 

[00:07:20.060] - Matt Florian

Right. Absolutely.

 

[00:07:23.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That's great. So I think let's talk about when we are on that journey, especially folks who are maybe just starting or like to go this direction when we look at from a good practices point of view. Do you have any suggestions or ideas as far as timelines for keeping the hybrid environment?

 

[00:07:48.860] - Matt Florian

For keeping or building? What does it take to do? Is that what you're thinking?

 

[00:07:55.610] - Mustansir Saifuddin

So I'm thinking two ways, right. One, is a lot of times the question come up, right? If I want to go the hybrid route, what is the best way to do it? Do I have a strategy? Timline strategy like I'm going to sunset the system in a certain time frame versus going maybe a one shot approach. I'm going to shut down this existing environment and then move completely into cloud. But I feel like hybrid is becoming a lot more common practice these days. So what would be a good timeline as far as a use case that we can apply in this situation?

 

[00:08:40.290] - Matt Florian

Sure. So we'll go back to that migrating to S/4HANA as an example. If you're going to migrate to S/4HANA and you are going to go with a brownfield or even greenfield strategy on migrating over to that from a homegrown point of sale system to different ERP coming in, whatever it is. That's a great time to go and make that decision of, I'm going to do this hybrid and start the work even before your migration for your S/4HANA and start bringing that information in and building a common, unified model. That would be the place to start. A lot of companies begin that work way too late, and they're trying to play catch up and they want to have unified data at day one, but they don't because they didn't put in that work early enough to say, how am I going to unify my data? And there are strategies to do it, but you need to think it from the very beginning so that you have a solid strategy to make it happen. The other approach is if you're, let's say, you're going to incrementally go and build out your hybrid. In that case, you start with a very high impact use case, something that a lot of people would go and jump on and want to use, and oftentimes it's going to be directly related to sales.

 

[00:10:16.690] - Matt Florian

That's something that's driving top line growth and wanting to tie that to other third party. Start with a very foundational use case that you can build from and then build the processes out around that. That just builds. It just naturally grows from there.

 

[00:10:38.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin

For sure. You kind of touched upon two topics over here, and I like to jump a little bit deeper into this one idea that you just shared. Like, when I'm going the hybrid route, what should be the focus from an implementation perspective, when you go in the hybrid approach, what are some of the things that you should keep in mind?

 

[00:11:08.210] - Matt Florian

Well, you should keep in mind first what's your point of reference is going to be in that hybrid. By point of reference, the hybrid system needs to have something to anchor itself to. For instance, if you're going in and you're going to build out again, I'm going to go back to the SAP. If you're building S/4HANA out, your point of reference is that S/4HANA model and then blending processes into that S/4HANA model. So S/4HANA becomes that anchor, and then you're building out a hybrid model that is SAP plus Salesforce, SAP plus HubSpot plus Google Analytics plus Legacy. But that's your foundation. If you can keep yourself focused on a foundation topic, then you'll be successful. If you go in without that focus, then the lack of clarity creates easily, will create chaos in your hybrid, and then you'll have a high risk of your perception of failure because it didn't answer the set of questions.

 

[00:12:29.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Yeah, I think that's an interesting insight, what you just shared. Because I think it seems like in order for you to keep your hybrid environment, I'm looking at how to be successful in this approach.

 

[00:12:47.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin

It seems like if you anchor yourself with a certain system as a starting point, it allows you or it gives you the flexibility to build it out versus going it all out and try to do too many things at the same time will set you up for failure. That's how I'm reading into that.

 

[00:13:05.650] - Matt Florian

It will. If you build out based upon your process areas of the business, and you build out the models from that and connect them, then you have a hybrid environment that is able to answer a whole breadth of questions because they're tied. There's a logical story being told by the data. If you don't have that focus, then the data can't tell a story. And you want that data to tell a story. And all of it has story, and some of that story is from archives, from prior implementations. But it has a story to tell. And in order to do that, you have to give it context and focus. And that's why you need to start this way. You need to keep that something to ground it.

 

[00:13:58.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin

I think, for sure. And I think one of the things, one of the takeaways that I see from this conversation is the fact that a lot of customers may have, depending on the industry, you may have a different set of challenges where you want to use this approach. There are certain things that are working in your current environment. You want to keep that as is. But there are other things that you want to bring in multiple data sets. And you take this approach of going to Snowflake using this multiple data set approach. But having an anchor system in the middle try to leverage that as a starting point. Right?

 

[00:14:37.210] - Matt Florian

Yeah. Because really your anchor is if you think about it another way, your anchor is your process. What is your process today? And that is your anchor. The process is supported by a system of some sort, whatever it may be, but the process is the anchor. And using that as the point lets you go and have your insights and understanding about what it is that you're attempting to achieve.

 

[00:15:08.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That kind of takes me to this question which I always ask as one key takeaway. Right. And today's conversation is in a way fairly broad, but I like to keep it controlled and in a way that makes sense for someone who is looking this route. So what would be the one thing that you would share with them as far as if they are thinking of hybrid or they're already on a journey to hybrid? What are some of the key takeaways that you want them to leave the session?

 

[00:15:41.140] - Matt Florian

If you're thinking about go to hybrid and working that way, it's not going to be just focused on what that process is, but architecturally from a data perspective is that think of that hybrid in the approach of creating data products that can answer many questions. Don't try to just answer one. Build an architecture that lets you use that hybrid data as Lego blocks to build and answer other questions. Because if you try to just focus on answering a question, then you're losing other valuable insights that you can gather by blending more data. That's what your hybrid is going to do. You're going to blend data together and you have to architect with intent so that you can answer more questions and have flexibility.

 

[00:16:39.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Yeah, I like your way of thinking, especially when you are looking at the future state. A lot of times folks want to take a narrow approach of getting things done, but that may not be the right answer, right.

 

[00:16:54.790] - Matt Florian

It's not just about getting it done. It's about architecting for the future and for your resiliency. And there are many models, many approaches, methodologies that let you architect for resiliency. And when you go down this path, that should be a guiding principle of what that hybrid is built off of, is modeled and architected for that resiliency so that you can answer many questions and be more agile in your answering your questions to the business and respond to changing economic and market conditions.

 

[00:17:35.660] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Great, thank you. This is really helpful.

 

[00:17:43.910] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt shared some valuable information on hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions. His main takeaway: focus on a data architecture perspective so your data can tell a story and answer multiple questions. It's not about just getting it done. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.