ETR Insights presents an interview summary with the Global Head of Enterprise Data for a large financial enterprise, which is in the midst of a multiyear shift from on-prem Teradata to GCP. Broadly they favor Microsoft Azure and GCP’s cloud-native applications and seek to consolidate any third-party vendors, with cost savings, staff training, and data security and protection top of mind. Read on to learn why Tableau, Alteryx, Qlik, and Talend will likely be retired, how our guest plans to upskill their IT staff, and what a shift to GCP means for the organization’s Oracle infrastructure.
Working in financials, one guesses that this executive’s top IT focus is regulatory compliance. “We still have some major initiatives going on besides keeping the lights on and besides regulatory. We are still investing in cloud migration, which is a major effort.” They are moving cautiously and seek to consolidate vendors and system integrators. “Whether it's on the cloud or other initiatives, we’re trying to get the right people and the best people from the vendor rather than just having too many vendors.” In particular, our guest favors the native offerings of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Computing; only the most distinct use cases for third-party vendors will be considered.
Our guest hopes to eliminate all Teradata on-prem servers, moving to Big Query within GCP. “We are at the very first month or two of the multiyear journey. We’ve started, but prior to this, we did a lot of prep work to even start the first month.” The company will maintain its Oracle infrastructure until l this migration to GCP is complete – which may take two to three years - but Oracle, too, will eventually go. Cloudera will feature in our guest’s hybrid environment; any current on-prem Microsoft service will move to Azure Synapse. While not currently in use, our guest expects to revisit Snowflake next year to compare services.
While they presently use ThoughtSpot, our guest expects to move over to Power BI on the same logic of preferring cloud-native services. “The big vendors are investing so much, so at least the lean is towards the native ones. And then really look at, do I really need that extra thing here or there, whether it's ThoughtSpot or others?” Looker and Power BI are being stood up in testing; our guest still uses Tableau, Alteryx, Qlik, Talend, TIBCO, and MicroStrategy but expects many of these to be retired. “MicroStrategy, Qlik, or Tableau, they could be, but we haven't started any serious effort to look at what to decommission in the context of cloud.” Some, like Tableau, are so embedded and user-friendly that it may take years to get rid of them. Of particular concern is disparate data security and data protection across multiple vendors and how best to consolidate and oversee.
Our guest favors Collibra for front-end, business-facing metadata and Informatica for technical metadata, though they are still figuring out whether these vendors are mature enough for their needs. “Now we are starting to use the cloud-native catalog capabilities as well, the scanning, the tagging, and the cataloging capabilities.” Delphix and Druva have been in use for a number of years. The organization evaluated Immuta but ultimately decided against it. “If you talk about entitled access control, you want to have it whether you’re doing this on-prem or on the cloud. Immuta is more on the cloud side, so it's not working for us.”
ETR Data: The model above depicts Net Score (Y-axis) and Pervasion (X-axis) for vendors in the Analytics / B.I. / Big Data sector (n>50) based on teh most recent JUL23 TSIS survey. Tableau is one of the most pervasive vendors, but the vendor's Net Score has fallen from the previous year's levels, and elevated churn persists. Meanwhile, Alteryx and Qlik fall within the middle of the pack on the left with lower Net Scores and Pervasion rates. Relatively, Alteryx has the higher Net Score, but Qlik is better positioned in terms of overall Pervasion.
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