It’s in days like these where survival depends on data to know what the hell is going on
Today, I’m a marketing leader at lenses.io but only a year or so ago I was an IT and data practitioner for a few different commercial software companies.
Both within my current role and my past I learned that marketing is one of the neediest (and hardest) when it comes to data.
We spend a huge part of a company’s budget. And without data, marketing is completely blind. At least sales can hear the till ringing or engineering can see their products coming off the manufacturing line.
Whilst I was a data practitioner, I often heard from IT and engineering teams, tasked with building data projects for their lines of business, “for data analytics, we’re an open-source only shop”. I could never get my head around that.
Open source can make sense but ruling it out completely as a principle to me made no sense.
I always wondered who really took those decisions and why.
In my current position, I would support open-source where it made sense as long as it didn’t distract us from meeting our business initiatives. And if it could be delivered fast. Give me 80% of something rather than 100% of nothing.
And as a service provided to me, I still expect to have a lot of (self service) control over the data products I want to deliver rather than everything locked down just because the product has vulnerabilities or lack of governance controls.
At tech Meetups and conferences I would hear of data projects involving man-years of engineering effort on open source. Technically impressive as they were, when you dug a little deeper you would find it’s not actually in production yet.
The reality is, unless you’re an Uber or Airbnb, you’re likely to struggle with open source in some way or another.
For a modern data platform, Apache Kafka is the stand-out data technology today: so versatile, it scales, massive community contribution. But mature and easy to manage it is not. And adoption (I mean actual use cases actually in production) is incredibly slow. I hear this every day from our prospects. Unfortunately, marketing teams tend to be one of the first to have been promised this service.
Which means CMOs are stuck in the waiting list whilst the platform is being prepared.
Or, more commonly, they are forced to go their own way and leverage cloud services or run their own platform outside of IT and not share data. As a former data consultant this is the scenario, unfortunately for those teams trying to deliver that service, where I spend the majority of my time helping my customers.
As a marketing leader, I simply cannot afford to wait one hour longer than I have to for insights.
An executive at Paypal was once asked on stage at an event I attended why he selected one (“expensive”) commercial tech instead of open source, wasn’t it expensive they asked?.
And his answer was “there’s nothing more expensive than not knowing what’s going on”.
It’s in days like these that we’re living through where survival in the marketplace is having answers to questions about what the hell is going on.
Whatever data technologies you choose, make sure your teams promote a DataOps strategy. If your business is struggling with Kafka in these tough times, here at Lenses.io we help organisations get immediate value, productivity and insights from real time data to build data intensity.
