February 9, 2022 was a landmark day at Starburst. We announced $250M in Series D at a market valuation of $3.35B in the morning and launched into Datanova, our second annual conference, an hour later. The two-day summit – sponsored by Accenture, AWS, Google Cloud, HP, Red Hat, Tableau, and others – was packed with unique and educational content for data leaders and data practitioners alike. It featured insights, labs, and hands-on sessions from data leaders, subject matter experts, and the world’s leading organizations. Close to 6,000 data enthusiasts registered to take part in this one-of-a-kind educational journey on Data Mesh with us!
Jess Iandiorio, our CMO, and Andy Mott, who we fondly call Captain Mesh, did a brilliant job orchestrating the event. We had the honor of hosting the legendary Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, pioneer of the PC revolution, and one of the biggest tech icons of all times in a very special keynote moderated by Vinay Saxena, VP/Fellow, CTO of GreenLake Cloud Services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Woz shared the founding story of Apple, how he met Steve Jobs, the ups, the downs, the known, the unknown, along with his thoughts on the future of technology.
It was an incredible day of learning, inspiration, science, and data! The key highlights from the conference are captured below:
CEO Keynote: Achieving a Data Mesh with Starburst
Sponsored by our partners, ThoughtSpot, in this session Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO of Starburst, emphasizes the Data Mesh imperative given the distributed nature of data. Data Mesh requires a paradigm shift involving people, process, and technology. “Ultimately a successful Data Mesh strategy puts the power of data into the hands of every member of your organization and allows your business to move quickly throughout change,” Justin tells us.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Starburst Product Vision
We’re on a mission to enable next generation analytics anywhere. In this session, Starburst’s Co-Founder and VP of Product, Matt Fuller, and Director of Product Strategy Russell Christopher give an overview of the product roadmap. “With Starburst, you can access all of your data simply and securely, with more than 40 pre-built connectors and more on the way,” shares Russell while Matt goes on to announce the availability of Starburst data products.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
EMIS: Leading Ground Breaking Research on the Treatment of COVID-19
Providing better patient care all comes down to having access to the right information at the right time. In this session, Richard Jarvis, CTO at EMIS Health discusses how he and his team made new scientific discoveries with Starburst. “We optimized the way that [health] care was delivered,” shares Richard. “The insight that we were able to glean from all of this data with a powerful platform on top meant that we could change how we approach COVID and deliver better patient care.”
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric: A Technical Comparison
On the surface, the idea of a Data Mesh and a Data Fabric might sound similar but they involve vastly different technical approaches. In this discussion, moderated by Sanjeev Mohan, former Gartner analyst Sanjeev Mohan, panelists Dr. Daniel Abadi, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and Zhamak Dehghani, Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks analyze the technical implementation details of a Data Mesh while comparing it to a Data Fabric.
“At the end of the day, we are trying to get rid of centralized controls or teams within an organization,” explains Dr. Abadi. “Data Mesh does this by moving the flow and requirements of data management out to the domain experts to create data products to share with the rest of the organization.” Zhamak debates, “Data Mesh didn’t start from a particular technology, as Data Fabric did. In fact, it came from an architectural pattern to allow us to still get access to the data that we want wherever it is, and trust in it.”
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Data Product Master Class with Accenture
Building and sharing data products is at the heart of the Data Mesh concept. Data products are the future of better and faster insights that drive new monetization opportunities. In this Master Class, Teresa Tung, Accenture’s Cloud First Chief Technologist teaches attendees how to identify a data product opportunity, how to sell it within the organization, and how to get started once your concept is sold. This session included a hands-on workshop.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
From Theory to Practice: O’Reilly Market Research
In this session, Zalando’s Max Schultze and Thoughtworks’ Arif Wider share their findings and insights from O’Reilly’s latest market research report, Data Mesh in Practice. Both presenters firmly believe that Data Mesh is poised to replace data lakes and data warehouses as the dominant architectural pattern in data and analytics. “The solution that Data Mesh suggests is federated governance, which means bringing together representatives of all groups to the table,” says Dr. Wider.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Self Service Data Infrastructure at British Telecom
In 2014, British Telecom launched its big data platform not as a centralized enterprise analytics platform but as a self-service data infrastructure. In four years, over 100 data products were developed in 7 business domains. In this talk, Phillip Radley, who spent more than 30 years at British Telecom shares key lessons learned through establishing and scaling a self-service data infrastructure. “Keep thinking of your data as a product, it’s not an asset you put in a cupboard,” advises Phillip. “It’s a product, and you make it work, and you grow it.”
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Vista: Driving Jaw Dropping Value with Data Mesh
“Data is like water. It should be available by the gallon so everybody can tap into it. It should be super easy to access, to store, and to transport. And in the end, it should be democratized so that it creates life,” Sebastian Klapdor, EVP & CDO at Vista, brilliantly set up his value talk. He discusses how Vista leverages Data Mesh to build scalable data products to generate sustainable value for their customers and business stakeholders.
The company dramatically increased efficiency and velocity, ramping up 25+ autonomous data product teams with end-to-end responsibility working in the mesh and delivering on its vision to make Vista one of the world’s most iconic data-and-analytics-driven companies.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
TSYS: Journey Towards Data Mesh
Hear from Mahesh Lagishetty, Vice President of Data Engineering, and Hariharan Banukumar, Director/Lead Data Architect at TSYS how the leading global payments provider, is building the next generation data platform leveraging Starburst and Delta Lake. This talk outlines the ongoing efforts to make the creation of data products as simple as applying a template. “We needed to make data accessible, understandable, and pull data metrics to build trust with the consumers,” informs Mahesh as he talks about moving from a centralized Data Lake architecture to a distributed Data Mesh architecture.
Stream the full on-demand session here.
Our partner AWS gave a lightning talk, How Starburst is Expediting Access to Data with Graviton with their solution architect emphasizing how “Starburst MPP query engine integrates tightly with Amazon based instances.” Day one of the conference concluded with a demo session, Touch, Talk, and See your Data with Tableau! on connecting Tableau directly to a Starburst instance by Tableau’s Vlad Usatin. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the content experience. Stay tuned for day two highlights very soon!
