GDPR Top Question: Where the F&#% is the Data?!

Octopai CEO Amnon Drori welcomes industry expert, Dr. Claudia Imhoff to the Octopai booth at EDW 2018.

We had the pleasure of spending the whole of last week in San Diego at EDW 2018 (Enterprise Data World) with the best of the best in data management. What an incredible group of people. What an incredible compilation of topics. From Data Governance and Stewardship, Data Architecture, Modeling, Metadata Management, NoSQL and database technologies, to Data and Information Quality, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Data Science, Big Data and Enterprise Information Management. It was jam packed with people talking about pain points, solutions, lessons learned, and of course people asking questions.

One of the most common questions heard at EDW, especially with GDPR only a few weeks away, was none other than, DRUMROLL…

“Where the f&#% is the data?!”

Such a basic question, but a totally loaded one. That’s right, we were overwhelmed by the amount of people who stopped by our booth to share with us that they too were experiencing frustrating barriers and challenges when it came to finding their data. This question hit so close to home for so many EDW 2018 attendees, and luckily we were there to shock them with our solution to this very difficult question.

As our CTO, Gal Ziton, performed demo after demo at our booth, we watched the eyes and the mouths of the engaged professionals. It was no surprise to us, but what we saw on their faces was complete and utter disbelief. Wonder. Excitement. And even relief.

Gal walked data analysts and architects carefully through our metadata management platform, showing them how they could reverse engineer any report to find any specific data element required to fix reports, make changes and improve accuracy. Beyond discovery he showed them how they could compare different reports, map out the data journey and get complete data lineage all within just a few seconds and automatically, with no manual tracing or mapping.

In short, he showed them in 5 seconds how they could find the f-ing data, which is kind of a big deal. A real game-changer.

For BI professionals used to spending extended periods of time and energy manually searching for specific data elements required for example for GDPR compliance, systems migration or upgrades, seeing the process fully automated was rather shocking. Someone likened it to trying to find your way out of a thick jungle with no map, no way of knowing which direction is which or where you’d already been, to suddenly finding a phone with GPS so you could find your way instantly. Clearly a stark difference. Automation will do that.

Metadata: A Strategic Imperative for Data Management

More than 70 data professionals attended Amnon’s session, which was highly impressive considering it coincided with EDW’s ice cream social! ?????

He talked about the birth of Octopai, the struggles the BI department experiences on a daily basis and how automation technology is revolutionizing the way these teams work. Instead of wasting weeks manually tracing through different BI systems trying to identify every single place an ETL process occurs in order to repair a broken process, Amnon told them about our customers – BI developers, data architects, CIOs, Analysts etc. who have literally added days to their lives by using Octopai to discover all this for them.

Back to work

The excitement around the product was massive and we talked to hundreds of people who couldn’t wait to see for themselves. As such, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve already activated a number of trials for companies we met just a few days ago at EDW.

After an amazing week in San Diego, we’re all back in the office, full speed ahead.

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