Ahmad Shakora Of Cloudera On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Managing Profits — tracking financial, sales, and marketing KPIs, analysing data derived from marketing campaigns or business management tools can help keep track of any numbers fluctuations in profit-loss margins and so on.

As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ahmad Shakora, Regional Vice President — Middle East, Turkey & Africa at Cloudera.

With a degree in Computer Information Systems from the prestigious University of Houston, Ahmad forayed into the IT sector with BMC Software. He led the brand as Regional Sales Director for over a decade, where he diligently strategised sales operations to suit markets. He moved on to take over as the Managing Sales Director for KSA, Kuwait, and Bahrain to further optimise market opportunities for BMC Software.

Ahmad’s stint with Cloudera began in 2018 when he came on board as the Regional Head-Middle East. Armed with an experience of 15 years in the IT industry, Ahmad set new performance benchmarks with a steady track record of delivering beyond expectations. Be it by overachieving sales targets or adding value to the customer experience through innovation and service improvement, he bought in only positive results. While working with and recruiting new talent, he focused on brand growth.

With hard work and consistent performance, he moved on to take over Cloudera’s responsibility as Regional Vice President-Middle East and Turkey in early 2021. Today, Ahmad is a recognised industry authoritarian with 20 years of competitive journey in the IT industry, covering various aspects of the business locally and internationally. Ahmad has led Cloudera in the Middle East and Turkey over the past 2.5 years, where the brand has witnessed solid growth reaffirming its continuous investments and commitment to this market. The African markets were recently added to his profile of responsibilities for brand expansion and market penetration.

Ahmad enjoys playing or watching sports, fine dining, leisure travel and socialising during his downtime. Highly decorated with many awards throughout his career, Ahmad has consistently overachieved expectations and transformed organisations into hypergrowth.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I was born in Kuwait and brought up in the US. My parents had migrated from Palestine and growing up, I learned a lot from them. My parents always encouraged me to focus on what I believed in and therefore, perseverance is the key message I have always focused on.

I have been in the technology industry for over 20 years now and began my journey with Cloudera almost 4 years ago as the Regional Head for the Middle East. This was exactly during the merger between HortonWorks and Cloudera. I have believed in the potential of this brand and the grateful for the opportunities that Cloudera has offered me.

From my ideology, when I believe in something, I give in all my hard work and efforts and hope for things to pan out the right way. I had faith in the idea of two competing technologies coming together to build something great.

I am now working as the Group Vice President of Emerging Markets across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

I’m not sure if this categorizes as a funny mistake, but definitely an interesting incident that happened! A little early on in my career, when I was working for a company in the USA, I had a meeting with a client based in Ohio. It was snowing, due to which the Senior Executive who was supposed to attend the meeting with me had to cancel. On my way to the meeting, I got a flat tire and was stuck in the middle of a snowy route.

What I didn’t realize was that because of the weather conditions, the client had shifted the meeting to an online session, which called for an awkward moment between the client and myself. However, I chose to make the best out of this awkward moment, owned up to an honest mistake, and held myself accountable for the error in communication. We ran the meeting online as it was planned and fortunately that resulted in a successful win for us! Although the incident turned out to be unpleasant with the snow situation, but it ended up being a meaningful experience.

My takeaway was that such things happen, humans make errors, but how you work toward fixing your errors, tells a lot about you, your personality, and your approach to challenges, both, personally, and professionally.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

A film that made a significant impact on me I would have to say is Rocky. Needless to say, everybody loves an underdog, but the thing that spoke to me from that film was simply the fact that the character had a ‘never give up’ attitude.

The movie resonated with me to a huge extent, because it highlights how everyone has their own stories to share, their own experiences that they go through, and everyone needs that one opportunity to prove themselves. So it’s about you being ready to grab that opportunity when it arrives in front of you.

Even in terms of my professional life, this film resonates with me, whether it’s when we’re interacting with different people, or working with customers on complex projects that need to drive some kind of value. Being able to manage the success of the projects, with the intensity at which we get them, can become pretty exhausting at times if you don’t have the right motivating factor or the right attitude. Handling tasks under high volume is now second nature to me given my years of experience within the industry and I love the rush.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Yes, I am in a personal capacity. I’m currently working with a charity across remote areas in India. The charity helps provide clean water across these areas by building water wells and giving them access to clean and fresh water.

I believe that it is always important to give back to the community and create opportunities in any way you can, even if it is through a minor contribution. Keep in mind that everyone needs an opportunity at some point in their lives, including you. Creating that opportunity for someone else when you’re able to is important.

Small contributions from our end can make a huge impact on someone else’s life. Helping others gain basic necessities in life and potentially helping them with the opportunity to live a better life can be quite rewarding.

I need to give a shout out to an initiative we run at Cloudera called Cloudera Cares. This initiative basically empowers employees like myself to help out and contribute to local communities in their areas of living and working. The Cloudera Cares initiative hosts volunteering opportunities lead by our ambassadors offering donations, learning opportunities, and more through NGOs and NPOs.

Last year Cloudera cares raised 23,507,10 AED for over 700 NPOs, and provided resources to hundreds of volunteers to assist over 60 organizations across the world.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organisations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organisation, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?

Being data-driven simply means that the business effectively uses all of its data consistently in its decision-making processes. This could include implementing changes, developing new products or software updates, or even internally enhancing employee productivity through results derived from data. On a practical level, an organisation’s data can be used for absolutely anything employees and employers wish to use it for. Let’s take enhancing customer experience as an example. The developer of a banking app, for instance, could easily run a survey to understand customer satisfaction. The data derived from that research could help identify which areas need improvement. Or even internally, when trying to boost employee productivity, data can help you identify what makes employees happier, motivating them to perform better.

In today’s work environment, we have the privilege of working with a diverse customer base across industries. Regardless of the number of sectors or areas of expertise, every business has three common themes:

• Customer experience
• Managing multiple channels of engagement
• Providing a unified view

These themes are prevalent across financial services, manufacturing, and service industries. Moreover, they are crucial to innovation in how we live, how we build cities, how we manage our transport, and how we will engage with businesses and governments going forward.

Understanding and anticipating needs are core to building a successful business but also making sure the channels of engagement are frictionless and easy for both the customer and the organisation to scale and maintaining consistency in how you refer to the customer. In regulated industries knowing your customer is critical to managing compliance, while in others, it is as simple as ensuring they receive the goods or services you offer. To be data driven is about aligning an overarching data strategy and building data and decision-aligned teams. Data is a strategic asset; making decisions at every level is improved using data.

So when we’re thinking about data as a strategic asset, let’s think about how we apply that strategy to help us understand and define challenges, policies to lead to learning and improvement.

Let’s make it practical. When thinking about visualisation and data collaboration, consider collecting data (metrics) on use: who uses the tools the most, what datasets do they access, how do they navigate the visuals, and so on. Consider how to be proactive by designing visualisations that align with needs, or better, enabling teams to self-serve what they need. Ensure feedback loops, for example, show when the data was extracted, provide the details of where it was sourced, indicate its quality, and offer methods for dataset review and commentary, which will help improve trust and reliance on datasets within the business. In turn, this helps feed into a culture of shared beliefs and values around data, leading to better decision making.

Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?

We would argue that every company within every industry can achieve countless benefits from data collaboration. It’s never a bad time to start working towards a shift to building a data-driven culture. However, three key industries that benefit from data collaboration include:

1. Travel agencies — statistics help them provide the best possible services for their clients. For example, information about peak travel times of the year, the most visited destinations, preferred flight timings, and so on.
2. Finance — within the fintech space, numbers mean everything. Data can help in a lot of ways in terms of consumer satisfaction, such as getting insights into which aspects of the platform clients use the most versus what factors can be improved, and how. Paying attention to even minor data can make a massive difference within fintech.
3. Retail — within the retail and eCommerce industries, understanding consumer behaviour online and suggesting suitable offers for consumers is what keeps them loyal to the company. Identifying times at which consumers are most likely to buy something, what products they buy the most, and so on, can be key to building a positive relationship with them.

We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

Data analytics and collaboration can significantly contribute to any business’ improvement. For example, data can help improve customer experience, companies can improve operational efficiency, and they can use the data to identify potential risks with a particular decision and take preventative measures accordingly. Moreover, data analytics can also help innovate new ideas. The critical thing to keep in mind is how you use your data. To determine how a business wants to use data, you first need to identify the business problem you’re looking to solve. Then, you would need to structure your data. Finally, as an organisation, you would have to turn your structured data into visual data to create your model to generate insights for you to come up with your ideal solution.

Within Cloudera, several systems help us make decisions based on data. Let’s take two examples. Firstly, within our Cloud platform, we collect anonymised data to inform us of how users interact with the tools. This helps us understand which features are most useful. For example, we have added data discovery into our machine learning tools, and we can see how adoption has grown. We can also see how many users retain the discovery feature and how many users choose to hide it. This enables us to reach out, explore that utilisation, and help optimise the product for our users.

This is a fine example. A more high-level model is the order in which we roll out our data applications by deployment. Again this is driven by adoption and direct customer consumption.

Another example we discussed recently on a roundtable of CDOs is marketing attribution. It is to understand better how each Dollar of investment in marketing can be attributed to a customer discussion, opportunity, and lead to new business. This has helped drive more productive use of our assets. This initiative was driven by our CMO and helps demonstrate how a data-driven culture can impact customer engagement.

Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organisations from your viewpoint? What are the challenges? How can organisations solve these challenges?

With regards to businesses today, having a data-driven approach to decision-making is more significant than a traditional approach. When organisations are looking to shift to a data-driven culture, they will encounter a few challenges. However, when thought out thoroughly, it’s not much of a tedious process. Potential challenges could be transferring your local data onto a private cloud, creating a hybrid model, the speed of the process, and so on. The initial process of the cloud shift can be prolonged. However, it is definitely worth the effort. Firstly, it’s important to note that an organisation’s data belongs to everyone. That being said, it is crucial to maintain confidentiality with the organisation’s data. It is key to identify where vulnerable data is stored, who has access to it, and how that access can be controlled.

Secondly, it would be beneficial to go through a ‘multi-cloud’ approach regarding the data-driven journey as that would help create a more flexible data structure. This approach helps build better performance at lower costs and greater efficiency and innovation. A multi-cloud strategy means adopting the public cloud and cloud-native data frameworks. Once that is done, you would need to connect both the cloud frameworks to create a hybrid cloud, which would give the user greater flexibility over how, when, and where they can access the data.

Lastly, the main motive here is to get tools that make it possible to automate. That would be the only way workers can truly gain the upper hand in their ability to access data at their fingertips.

Hardware, capacity, cloud, and regulations with the volume of data are continuing to increase.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

Well, based on my experience, a company can leverage their data in many ways, provided they optimally utilise the data. Five of the many ways for a company to effectively leverage data would be:

1. Customer Satisfaction — tracking customer acquisition allows you to measure the success rate of any marketing tactics you use.
2. Implementing upgrades — gathering data to incorporate improvements is another way. Use your data to identify what aspect of your business engages with customers the most and which areas require improvement.
3. Increase sales revenue — use your data to identify what products consumers use the most and why, and you can either decide to increase the production of that specific product or rework other products accordingly.
4. Managing Profits — tracking financial, sales, and marketing KPIs, analysing data derived from marketing campaigns or business management tools can help keep track of any numbers fluctuations in profit-loss margins and so on.
5. Evaluating Market Trends — region-specific data can help identify what is going on in the market enabling businesses to make brand-development decisions accordingly to keep up with trends and attract more consumers.

Modern data platforms can be used for multiple purposes when transforming or optimising your business. Data can help with financial services and insurance, consumer analytics, network analytics, clinical trials with real-world evidence for the medical industry, or even remote monitoring and predictive maintenance for manufacturing businesses.

For instance, our client, a large bank in MEA, faced challenges in understanding customer expectations. Consumers were looking for faster digital services, so the bank had to upgrade their architecture to accommodate a digital transformation. We recommended that they adopt the Data-as-a-Service platform, which enables rapid data-driven decision-making. Through this, they could send out 10 million real-time alerts and notifications, improve their customer engagement and segmentation, and reduce dead cash holdings at ATMs, which meant that they could redirect excess cash for additional revenue generation. We supported the bank’s vision to consolidate its entire data inside one platform to create a streaming data warehouse where real-time information is available for processing without delay. And this is just one of many examples.

The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?

The cultural change within the organisation through the data-driven journey would simply suggest that the Lines of Business and IT would need to collaborate to identify how the data needs to be managed and who would be liable for which data and what processes. It is also important to understand that an organisation’s data belongs to everyone within the organisation. The key to success is through unison.

The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?

Over the next five years, the need to organise and analyse data will become much more prominent. We’re already in a world that is embracing a technological revolution. We’re revolving around new concepts such as living and working in a metaverse, the growth of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, etc. Keeping that in mind, it’s very likely that most of our interactions will be through technology, which is already happening. In such times, it is difficult to truly understand the human aspect of things to create something better that would benefit people. Our only approach to analysing what works and builds engagement within consumers is through what we can learn from any data we draw. Information will be the key factor in drawing any conclusions when it comes to the improvement of an app, product, or the organisation as a whole.

Does your organisation have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?

We have a few things in the pipeline that we are excited about. One of the projects we’re currently working on are translations of our Children’s AI book, targeted at kids aged 8–10 years old. The book is already available in different languages across some of our key locations. The book is about why data is important and how it can help in improving processes. It shows simple ways of problem-solving with data in a way that kids can understand. It’s never too early to start teaching data literacy! It’s even more important to expose kids to it who otherwise may not have the opportunity. Through our partnership with the Boys & Girls Club and education company Ready AI, we have been able to create a tool where the adults in children’s lives can teach them skills for the workforce of the future. A small ‘working group’ of parents and kids at Cloudera have been reading this book at home and so far, the reviews have been good! We will have more exciting local news to share later this year.

Other than the AI book, with analysts suggesting that the total amount of data is expected to triple by 2025, our sights are firmly focused on hybrid data. We think that this is a huge and exciting opportunity but also a tough challenge. Luckily, we’re right at the forefront of hybrid data, which is somewhat of a ‘back to the future’ moment for us, now that big data is cool again.

We’re primed and ready to help businesses capitalise on this moment, as we possess the ability to help them harness the value of all that data, no matter where it is. Our technology strategy that blends the integration of multi-function data analytics, with secure and governed data management, for hybrid and multi-cloud data, built with open source technology operating as a cohesive system, is exactly the modern data architecture industry experts recommend companies adopt.

We remain committed to our vision of making data and analytics easy and accessible to everyone and our mission to be the leader in hybrid data. We believe that data can make what is impossible today, possible tomorrow.

How can our readers further follow your work?

You can follow our work through our website blog or follow our company page https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloudera/

You can also connect with me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmad-shakora-18b38113b/

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!