The Evolution of the BI Market

A History of Holistics, and the Evolution of the BI Market (The Data Stack Show podcast) — Instead of an article this week, I thought to share something in a different medium instead.

I was recently invited on a podcast with Kostas Pardalis of RudderStack, where I shared our views on the evolution of business intelligence market, and how Holistics sees itself (and differentiates itself!) in that space. I talked about how there's a general perception around BI as simply being about 'charts and visualizations', and how this is shifting towards a more nuanced, more comprehensive view as organizations mature in their data mindsets.

I also covered the three bottlenecks every data analyst faces (hint: it's with their colleagues!) and also about the history of Holistics itself.

This is an hour long conversation, and Pardalis was kind enough to provide listeners with a transcript. If you like listening to podcasts, and you're curious enough to hear about the Holistics backstory, here it is.

The Circular Cycle of "People, Process, Technology" in Analytics (video) — Holistics's Chief of Staff Evan Tan takes to LinkedIn to talk about the age-old topic of "people, process, and technology" and how it can become a circular, self-reinforcing cycle: the first people you hire bring in their experience and the processes they're most comfortable with, which in turn informs the tools you choose, which in turn attracts people who are familiar with that tool. And on it goes.

---

Links From Elsewhere

Watch out Salesforce: Twilio, Segment and the $100B Battle for the Customer Engagement Platform — Lars Kamp of Intermix.io has written an excellent post analyzing the recent Twilio/Segment acquisition and what it might mean for… Salesforce.

In the article, Kamp argues that given the improvement in cloud data infrastructure and the explosion of SaaS tools, traditional CRMs (where a key benefit is that it 'provides a 360-degree view of your customers') will gradually be replaced by another approach: a Customer Data Platform, or CDP. He argues that instead of trying to sync everything back-and-forth with the CRM, companies will collect customer data from different sources into a central data warehouse, and mash them up to provide the same 360-degree view of the customer. This trend, Kamp asserts, makes CRMs less useful over time.

Personally, I think there's still value in using CRMs, because the best CRMs make it easy for sales-team/human data input. I suppose CRMs might become 'just another data source' for the CDP, in Kamp's view of the world. This is an interesting take. We shall see.

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure — Matt Bornstein, Martin Casado, and Jennifer Li of the a16z Enterprise Team have put together an extremely comprehensive report on different data architectures, after interviewing over 20 data practitioners in the industry.

This is pretty good read for those of you who want to grok several different data architecture 'blueprints'. More interestingly, the group asks an open-ended question about the convergence of AI/ML and analytics. The crux of the question is as follows: as AI/ML grows in importance, will we see more ML functionality implemented as native SQL commands inside the data-warehouse?

We do see some of that happening today, with projects like BigQuery ML. But your guess is as good as mine.

Bornstein, Casado and Li also talk about the different architectual shifts that's unique to the data infrastructure space, such as from on-premise to cloud data warehouse, from ETL to ELT, from Hadoop to data lakes and from analyst teams to self-service insights etc. It reminds me a little of what we wrote in our analytics guidebook (specifically, the section titled our biases of a good analytics stack)

---

Are you an analytics leader in South East Asia?

I'm trying to put together something for the analytics community in the South East Asia region. If you're an analytics leader in a company in SEA, let me know (just hit reply to this email!), so I'll keep you in the loop.

---

That's it for this week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, I'd be very appreciative if you forwarded it to a friend. And if you have any feedback for me, hit the reply button and shoot me an email — I'm always happy to hear from readers.

As always, I wish you a good week ahead,

Warmly,

Huy,

Co-founder, Holistics.