Last month, thousands of big data professionals came to the Strata Data Conference in New York to discover the latest tools and technologies. Cambridge Semantics’ executives and staff were waiting for them with a booth and a demo of the new Anzo Smart Data Lake (ASDL) 4.0.
The following are the perspectives of several Cambridge Semantics executives regarding this year’s show and the reaction to the ASDL 4.0 launch.
John Rueter, Vice President of Marketing
“This year we found a deeper understanding by attendees that they need to find new ways of working with data and information. They recognize that extracting value from data is just too difficult and takes too long. Many were much more well-versed on data lakes and the potential for data lakes and the kinds of results that can happen. I think this reflects a maturation of the market as the traditional ways of managing data are no longer seen as sufficient.
“With Anzo SDL 4.0 specifically, people were intrigued by the concept of semantic data layers. It was really a new concept to them and the prevailing questions were ‘How does it work?’ and ‘What we can do with it?’ People were also asking about our end-to-end approach and really wanted to understand the whole process of data discovery and analytics and were open to the idea that one company would be able to do that for them.
“The presentation by Ben Szekely, our Vice President of Solution Engineering, was well attended, and the traffic flow of the booth was very good. We had a lot of substantive and engaging conversations. This was the right show for us this year.”
Marty Loughlin, Vice President of Financial Services
“The data lake is one of the established categories at Strata now. There are several players in the big data space offering solutions whereas three years ago no one understood what a data lake was. More enterprises are integrating big data solutions and data lake platforms into their operations and realize it is not only a great opportunity, but a major advantage.
“Our differentiation in offering a solution with multiple dimensions was clear as a lot of the other players are pitching point tools. They may solve a particular problem but they don’t offer an end-to-end platform. And so many of the other data lake tools talk about structured data but don’t really address unstructured data. They are not really integrating documents or text which we are, so that’s a unique attraction.
“One large brand came to our booth because they determined that the graph-based analytics approach has a lot of value. When we started talking to them about semantics and showed them the Anzo SDL 4.0 platform, they were blown away. They were impressed with the maturity of the solution, the ability to scale and the incredible performance.”
Sam Chance, Managing Director of Pre-Sales
“It seemed like the concept of the Enterprise Knowledge Graph was something that both resonated with a lot of people and seemed highly relevant. We had a lot of discussions about Cambridge being able to bring in all your data and content together in one place and enable users to interact with it without going to individual silos.
“I also noticed there was a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning at this year’s show. When people brought up the subject of AI, I would say we employ natural language processing (NLP) on the unstructured side, so we are both a consumer of AI and we provide input to AI, because the better the data you bring to any algorithm, the better the outcome is going to be.
“In the larger scheme of things, autonomous information systems are where we are headed and strong semantics and use of meta data are going to be fundamental to their functionality at scale. Because if you don’t treat the semantics and meta data as first-class citizens and broad-scale enablers, you just going to have these one-offs and cool applications. But what enterprises really want to do is move toward broad-scale adoption of smart technologies like the IoT. It’s good to have that nervous system altogether but you need the intelligence at a scale and the semantics and rich data capabilities to enable all of that. That’s what our Anzo SDL 4.0 can provide.”
To learn more about Anzo Smart Data Lake 4.0, watch our on-demand webinar "A Breakthrough Data Lake Platform for the Enterprise Information Fabric".
