In our last post we caught up with Yellowbrick Data CEO Neil Carson to discuss the background on the company and market. We continue here with more detail on Yellowbrick and the cloud.
Q: You are making an appliance. The cloud is getting a lot of attention. Help us understand.
Actually, we are making a software product that integrates the very latest hardware technologies and today we sell that as an integrated offering.
We are firm believers that hybrid cloud is the future, and you will find that the majority of CIOs and industry analysts accept this.
Hybrid represents the combination of public cloud and other deployments including colocation, private data centers modeled as private cloud, public cloud, and increasingly the edge. A hybrid cloud entails a combination of these deployments and moving data between them. We believe in that vision and will be a part of it across the entire spectrum.
Yellowbrick Data is designed for the hybrid cloud, public, private, and the rest.
When we look at the data warehousing market, analyst data says between 80-90%, and some say more, is still focused on private clouds and modernizing on-premises application infrastructure. Looking at mission-critical “legacy” workloads (i.e., existing, non-cloud) in a broad sense, a recent 451 Research survey, Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Workloads and Key Projects 2018, noted, “A plurality of respondents (44%) pointed to ‘modernization in place’ as the way forward – keeping workloads on-premises but updating the underlying application/infrastructure architecture.” (You can sign up for a complimentary copy of the research note here.)
So at Yellowbrick we started there, with the immediate, near term challenges confronting the majority of large enterprise customers.
We then immediately built features for interoperability with public clouds, which are all here today. Examples are interoperability with AWS and Azure shared storage and file formats.
So our next stage is to be in the public clouds as well. We are in discussions with major cloud providers about the best way to do that. Many of our largest customers are encouraging cloud providers to do that as well. We will get there soon, likely sometime next year.
Q: So I will be able to consume Yellowbrick Data in Amazon or Azure or Google soon?
That is our goal and intent. We are making tangible progress with major cloud providers in getting there. We expect details to come next year.
Q: If a company is “all-in” on cloud, what should they do now?
We have multiple customers who have run their data center workloads in both AWS and Azure. In order to take advantage of a data warehouse with significantly better economics and performance, they chose to co-locate their Yellowbrick Data deployments next to those clouds.
Of course, this direct to cloud connection capability is a well-known deployment strategy and any major co-location provider can facilitate such setups.
Q: What if I am running Redshift?
Redshift is a great place to get started. It is also inspired by PostgreSQL as is Yellowbrick. So we expect a high degree of compatibility with Redshift deployments.
There are some known challenges with some cloud deployments as you scale services when adding more end users through an application, or add more analysts directly to the data warehouse. In these cases, Yellowbrick Data has proven to be more advantageous for our customers.
This is also a good time to note that PostgreSQL is the underlying inspiration behind a range of traditional data warehouses as well including Netezza/IBM, Vertica/MicroFocus, Greenplum/Pivotal, and Aster/Teradata. Yellowbrick Data serves all of these workloads extremely well and customers looking for alternatives to any of these solutions should give us a ring.
Q: Could you recap the Yellowbrick Data cloud strategy?
We are pro-cloud. And over time you will see Yellowbrick Data in many more places.
We believe in the hybrid cloud and we will build hybrid cloud products from public to private clouds, colocation, on-premises, and network edge. Further, we expect a feature rich roadmap, driven by customer needs, as to how they want these deployments to interoperate. Ultimately this new analytics food chain from on-premises to cloud to edge, will spawn new business models and revenue opportunities for our customers.
