Putting an End to the Middleman with James Weakley
Hashmap on Tap Ep. 114
On this episode of Hashmap on Tap, James Weakley, Co-Founder of Omanta, joins the show to tell us a little more about how they got started and how they are making live-querying and reverse ETL easier than ever imagined.
Omnata was developed from challenges James was facing during his time at NIB, a publicly listed health insurance company. They were using Databricks to create predictive models which created large data sets (about 40 million records). That’s when the question arose, “Where should this data live? In the CRM?” Storing all those records in the CRM would have greatly impacted their storage capacity so that was not an option. However, they wanted to make sure they had access to all this data so that they could analyze and make business-critical decisions from it. It looked like connecting these 40 million records to their Snowflake Data Cloud would require a significant infrastructure project just to establish this foundation. It seemed frustrating to James because both Salesforce and Snowflake were cloud platforms and all his data had to be stored in the same data center in Sydney, the only thing lacking was the connection between the two.
“You’re not just trying to get better uptime or better infrastructure, you’re trying to stop doing some of the old things that don’t need to be done anymore.”
-James Weakley
He knew there had to be a simpler solution. He began asking questions like “Why am I, the customer, brokering the connection between Snowflake and Salesforce?” and “Why do I even need infrastructure in the middle?” This challenge inspired James to use his spare time to create a custom Snowflake connector in 2018. He want to make sure his solution worked on any size data set, delivered data in real-time, and was able to plug directly into Snowflake tables. In 2019, James delivered a very early version of Omnata to Salesforce as a free app in Salesforce AppExchange. After successfully implementing the connector at NIB and having many positive conversations around it, James decided to make Omnata a full-time commitment.
Omnata Connect is a fantastic enterprise integration solution for live querying data. Omnata Push is a reverse ETL tool, where data isn’t actually extracted from the outside. It is instead pushed directly from the warehouse. Omanta cuts out legacy middleware and reduces ETL jobs and allows you to start providing value faster. Listen in to the episode to hear more perspectives from James on how Omanta works and his relationship with Snowflake.
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