Inside Insights: Power of a Cloud Data Warehouse with Matt Florian

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Matt Florian of Comerit, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to talk about the urgency and motivation for companies to move to a cloud-based data warehouse. This is the beginning of a series of episodes that will dive into how newer tools, like Snowflake, are changing the landscape for companies to blend in different types of data, including their existing SAP systems.  Matt's takeaway: don't wait to start. There will always be something new coming on the horizon so start with a small project and buildup.

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.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:03.690] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this first episode of a multipart series, I welcome Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt shares his thoughts on why companies are moving to a cloud data warehouse with such a sense of urgency. With data volumes growing, it's important for companies to take advantage of the power of new technology tools that Matt talks about, including snowflake.

 

[00:00:35.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Hello, Matt. How are you?

 

[00:00:37.600] - Matt Florian

I'm doing fine Mustansir how are you?

 

[00:00:40.090] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Doing well. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. It's a pleasure to have you on my show.

 

[00:00:46.160] - Matt Florian

I'm very grateful to be a member of it and be part of this with you, man.

 

[00:00:51.710] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Awesome. So today we will kick off basically the idea is to kick off a series of podcasts which will revolve around cloud based data warehouses. And we would like to dive into this topic of why companies are transitioning to cloud based data warehouses. Right. And at the same time, what are some of the benefits that they are getting with this move? How does that sound to you?

 

[00:01:18.420] - Matt Florian

That sounds great. Let's get talking.

 

[00:01:21.110] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Awesome. Okay. I know this topic is very near and dear to you, and I'm very glad that we have you on our show, and this will be a great conversation. So let's start with our why, right? So why it is so important right now, moving to a cloud based data warehouse? And the urgency. I think there's two components of this. Right. Why is it important for companies and the same time? What is the urgency behind it?

 

[00:01:47.800] - Matt Florian

Sure. Well, I think that a lot of companies have taken a fair amount of time in the last several years of getting their processes in place and fixing processes with implementations of like SAP and other large ERP. At the same time, you have other parts of the business that are trying to get process in place with a Salesforce or other CRM and other tools out there like that. And each of these platforms, they've been operating fairly independently. And you can do a lot outside of SAP, but getting the full value, I think businesses are looking to get leverage, full value of those implementations, that investment by blending that data with other data, with other stuff. And that's why there's a big urgency and a big move, because it's just being able to do that and do it easily.

 

[00:02:48.940] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That makes sense. Yeah. I think one key word that I got out of this conversation is you mentioned SAP being a central focal point for a lot of companies, but at the same time, they do have these other systems where they want to bring in this information together and blend it together.

 

[00:03:08.220] - Matt Florian

And even we see this a lot with SAP implementation right. That SAP is able to manage a good part of the process, but it doesn't always manage all of the process. There's still other third party applications outside of the SAP ecosystem that are part of the business process and part of the outcomes of the business. And so if you're measuring your outcomes, you have to look at all that data together for sure.

 

[00:03:37.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That brings up another point. What are some of the benefits of moving to the cloud? We talk about cloud in a lot of different contexts. Like when you talk about data warehouse and going to a data warehouse based cloud, what are some of the benefits that you see?

 

[00:03:52.090] - Matt Florian

Well, a lot of the new modern data warehouse and cloud applications up there for data management focus, the purchasing and how you procure that is a whole different paradigm today than it was even five years ago. Five years ago, we talked about moving to the cloud and putting stuff into Azure data warehouse or Amazon Redshift. And when you did that, that was good. But you're buying capacity way up front. And some of the more modern warehouses I try not to use the warehouse term overboard here, but the modern data platforms out there really moved over to a utility model where you're charged just for what you're actually using. And combining that with serverless technology, where you're spinning up compute as needed on demand and scaling it, all things that we can't do in even some of the traditional AWS infrastructure and definitely could not do on-premise. So we have such flexibility to solve big problems with data with these cloud applications done smart.

 

[00:05:15.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Yeah, I think the key word I hear from a lot of customers, and you mentioned it a couple of times here, is scalability. Right. And then the ability to control that which is not available or which was not available earlier in the traditional data platforms, if you want to use that terminology. Right. So it's a big win, especially when the data volumes are growing at a very rapid pace. And you do want to have that flexibility. And I think you do get both of them with this new move or the benefits that customers are seeing in real time now.

 

[00:05:56.860] - Matt Florian

And if you think about we pick on SAC for a minute. We think about the infrastructure that we have to design and build out for SAP. For a lot of those implementations, you have to preplan everything that you're going to do. And once you go outside of that planned infrastructure, then it requires replanning. And so businesses will often limit themselves to what data they're going to do in there, not because of the limitations of data, but limitations of the infrastructure. So if I can change that dynamic and say, let's do this over in, say, a Snowflake data platform and do this inside a snowflake or inside a Snowflake, I can scale that infrastructure, the compute resources up and out dynamically. And that's something that you really cannot do inside of an SAP here and even in Azure data warehouse couldn't do that kind of scaling. So anybody that's able to make that easy like Snowflake did, that is a proof point right there to why we should move into the cloud.

 

[00:07:16.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Yeah, definitely. That makes sense. I think that being said, let's talk about some of the choices available. I think that is one of the key questions a lot of customers are looking for now after COVID has been over. There seems to be a lot of things are happening in the cloud, especially with the amount of choices customers have. I mean, would you like to share some experiences about what are some of the data platform choices that are available and how to the stack up from your perspective?

 

[00:07:52.460] - Matt Florian

Well, we've had opportunities to do cloud computing, cloud build, data warehouse in the cloud for several years now. And AWS and even Azure were very early into the gate of what you could do and they followed a model that was that procurement model inside of the cloud that says, hey, buy this much free capacity and you want to purchase that capacity. And that worked well. And I tell you, when we first did some Azure data warehouses, those warehouses screamed, we moved stuff off of Legacy to onprem into Azure and it was performing tremendously, but it also didn't scale. And how we moved data in was more complicated and it kept a lot of the Legacy mentality about infrastructure in place that you had to pre plan for. And so we didn't really see all the benefits that we should have seen out of it. The same can be said with AWS and Redshift, same kind of mentality, same idea. And it wasn't really until they said that Snowflake model came out that disrupted the marketplace. And I think you hear so much about Snowflake as being one of the predominant tools and platforms talked about today.

 

[00:09:30.510] - Matt Florian

That's because it's utility, right? If I can service 50 queries with one set of compute, then I'm only charged for that one set of compute for the seconds in which I use it and then it turns off. And if I need to go and open up another room, it's like having you a big conference center. If I can service everybody in one room, great, I'm paid for one room. But if I need to spill out into three rooms, I can just spill out the three rooms, turn the lights on and run it until I don't need those other two rooms again, and then come back down into the one without any interactions, without any really taking action. And that's such a big difference in the compute and how we think about data. But it also required at the same time that we end up needing to change how we think about how we're putting data in and building that data. It's a complete mind shift entirely.

 

[00:10:34.240] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That makes sense. I think that's the key piece, right? How you are able to get the flexibility and then control what you want and what you don't want at any given time, which is a lot of customers are asking for, especially when they don't know what the end state is going to look like. Right. I mean, this is what I need now, but it may change in a few months depending on what kind of information they want to bring into the platform and use it. Right. So that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's move away from this topic. Let's talk about on a personal note. You've been doing this technology for quite some time. What are some of the biggest accomplishment that you see you have accomplished over your personal or your professional career biggest.

 

[00:11:26.820] - Matt Florian

Accomplishments besides maintaining a career as long as I have, that itself can be an accomplishment. But there you go. It's funny, early on in my career, I was on a project when I worked as a consultant for IBM and we built an Oncology database for Emory University. And this database, the contract issues can be run into, but the client really wanted a Cadillac for a database and platform that they had, but they had the money for a Yugo instead. And we built just a very streamlined platform and data engineering to build out this Oncology database and take all this clinical data that in the end off of a low cost ETL tool that at the end of the year end up winning awards for the actual design and implementation because it wouldn't identify all these clusters. All these clusters where cancer was occurring and fed and resulted in policy changes and all this great stuff that happened with it. It was done off of a low cost solution to a big problem. And when you can achieve something like that, simplicity to solve something big, man Elvis doesn't get much better than that.

 

[00:13:11.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That's a great story. I think at the end of the day, I think it's just a lot of folks talk about data and building these huge data warehouse solutions, right? What is that? It's solving, right? And if you are solving a business case where the organization can see the value right off the bat, and I think that's what really stands out and that's what I got out of this story. So really awesome. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think this is really good. So that kind of gets me into my next question. It's a nice segue, which is the real meat of this conversation, right. How can organizations make the right choice? I mean, there's a lot of choices, like you mentioned earlier, how can organizations make the right choice of picking the cloud data warehouse that works for them? What would you tell them?

 

[00:14:04.990] - Matt Florian

So what I would tell them is to stop and take a look at what their end goal is for analytics and what it is that they're what type of measures and outcomes they're really trying to get at and build from there. Don't try to jump to the finish line without building a good quality data pipeline. We can rebuild things so much faster than what we used to. Now that being resistant to changing this because you're afraid of the cost and effort that it will take to rebuild your pipelines, that you have the tools that exist today. We can rapidly build and improve on pipelines. So it's taking a look at all the tools that you have and getting down to again, the simplest set of solutions to solve your biggest problems is achievable and it can be done.

 

[00:15:12.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin

It seems like, to me, it seems like almost like know your end state and then kind of work backwards. And as long as you can see your end state as an organization, I think it's much easier to make the right choice in terms of these clusters of choices out there for customers.

 

[00:15:29.470] - Matt Florian

Yep. And we help customers with that all the time.

 

[00:15:33.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Definitely. I think that's the key word, right. Especially when there are choices, there are always confusion. And the confusion takes over the choices sometimes and it feels like you're going in a direction but you're not sure if the direction is correct or not unless you have that insights like you mentioned. Start with the end state and then look back and see what you need to achieve and how you can achieve that. Right, so that's a great advice.

 

[00:16:01.910] - Matt Florian

It's confusion and just being stuck in old ways of thinking.

 

[00:16:27.210] - Mustansir Saifuddin

That's the mindset. Right. And we talk about change management, especially when it comes to going to the cloud based data platforms. There is a huge change management involved in this whole process.

 

[00:16:27.210] - Matt Florian

Yeah, we could have a whole episode just on the change management of going to the cloud

 

[00:16:28.840] - Mustansir Saifuddin

and that's the goal. So I think what you want to do with this episode right now is to kind of set the stage of what's coming next. Especially we talk about the choices, we talked about what should be the right way to go, move forward, especially when you are trying to start on this journey or maybe you're in the middle of the journey and you're not seeing the results. Right. All of those different topics that we will cover them as we move along in this series. What is one of the key takeaways that you want to leave with the listeners today?

 

[00:17:03.710] - Matt Florian

The key takeaway for those that are looking at cloud analytics and go into the cloud is to not wait to take that journey. Start it, you can start it with a small project and then build up, but start the journey and start getting there and going through that transformation. It's not a painful transformation, but it is a transformation and start making it happen. Don't wait, don't wait for the next thing to come out. There's always something else coming out, but there's some outstanding tools to go and make that move today, and there's no reason to wait anymore.

 

[00:17:49.160] - Mustansir Saifuddin

What a great advice. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's what I'm hearing, and I keep seeing that time is of essence, right? Especially when folks are looking at moving that leap of fate into this new platform. It seems like the approach has changed in the past. You're planning it out for so long and then you get on the journey. Now it seems like the journey is almost here for you. You just need to get on it and move on forward.

 

[00:18:21.860] - Matt Florian

Absolutely.

 

[00:18:24.190] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Well, it's a great conversation with you, Matt, and I'm really glad that we were able to cover this topic today.

 

[00:18:36.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin

Thanks for listening to tech-driven business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt gave a great overview on the power of a cloud based data warehouse and why organizations should consider the move. His main takeaway? Don't wait. Start with a small project and build up. There will always be something new to come down the pipeline. 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 us at isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.