June 2024 Summaries

Fivetran was a key presence at Data + AI Summit 2024, showcasing its strategic partnership with Databricks. The company's team led or participated in several sessions, including a customer session on National Australia Bank's infrastructure modernization journey and a presentation by Kelly Kohleffel on building data legacy. Fivetran emphasized the importance of infrastructure modernization, highlighting four key lessons from National Australia Bank's Project Ada, which include changing business-led initiatives, clear communication and management, rewarding successes, and focusing on basics such as risk management. The company also discussed its capabilities in supporting hybrid environments and data readiness for innovation and generative AI. Additionally, Fivetran participated in a panel discussion on generative AI with industry leaders, discussing barriers to success and steps to ensure quality, deterministic results. Anjan Kundavaram, Fivetran's new CPO, emphasized the importance of user-facing simplicity and performant, reliable solutions for handling diverse data sources. The company also launched its Managed Data Lake Service, which supports large data volumes and AI workloads in a flexible, scalable, and secure platform.

Fivetran has been named a finalist for the Commercial Marketplace 2024 Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year award, placing it among an elite group of Microsoft partners recognized for innovative approaches and successful delivery of customer solutions using Microsoft technologies. The nominations were selected from over 2,000 submissions, with Fivetran standing out in the Commercial Marketplace category. This recognition highlights Fivetran's commitment to leveraging the Microsoft commercial marketplace as a core part of its Go-To-Market and joint sales strategy with Microsoft. The partnership enables seamless marketplace transactability and streamlines customer acquisition for Azure adoption, eliminating lengthy out-listing processes. Enterprises such as JetBlue, Paul Hewitt, and Hyper Hippo leverage Fivetran's support of Microsoft OneLake in Microsoft Fabric and Delta Lake on Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS Gen2) to move and centralize data from any source and drive superior business outcomes.

As a leading Snowflake Technology Partner, Fivetran made a significant impact at Snowflake Summit 2024 by introducing its latest innovation: the Fivetran Managed Data Lake Service, which automates and streamlines data lake management. This new offering is designed to help customers centralize their data into a single platform, making it easier to analyze and drive innovation. Additionally, Fivetran expanded its partnership with Snowflake by introducing support for Iceberg Tables and announcing the development of enterprise-ready Native Apps, which enable organizations to create a fully automated and scalable lakehouse architecture within Snowflake. The company also showcased its capabilities in real-time data integration through sessions with BlackRock and Honeywell, highlighting its high-volume, low-latency data movement capabilities. Furthermore, Fivetran hosted several social events throughout the summit, providing opportunities for attendees to connect and network with the community. Overall, Fivetran's presence at Snowflake Summit 2024 demonstrated its commitment to driving business value through innovative solutions and strong partnerships.

Manufacturers are leveraging digital technologies such as digital twins, predictive maintenance, and cloud systems to improve operations. However, many companies still struggle with consolidating data from multiple sources, which can lead to inefficiencies and downtime. By combining asset-based sensors, predictive maintenance algorithms, and ordering and staffing systems, manufacturers can create real-time insights that enable them to respond quickly to disruptions and keep assets operating at maximum efficiency. This approach is particularly relevant in the transportation industry, where companies can use data to coordinate operations and minimize downtime. By centralizing data and using cloud-based services, manufacturers can unlock new opportunities for agility and situational awareness, ultimately delivering real value to customers.

Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionizing software by increasing productivity, finding innovative solutions, and generating unique and relevant information at scale. However, as GenAI becomes more widespread, concerns around data privacy and ethical issues are growing. Companies must be cautious when using GenAI to avoid disclosing proprietary information, violating intellectual property protections, exposing personal data, violating customer contracts, or deceiving customers with AI-generated content. The legal landscape surrounding AI is evolving rapidly, but not as fast as the technology itself. Companies should use existing laws and frameworks as a guide to establish best practices for implementing GenAI while minimizing potential risks. These best practices include transparency and documentation, localizing AI models, starting small and experimenting, focusing on discovering and connecting, preserving the human element, and maintaining transparency and logs. By adopting these measures, companies can maximize the tremendous business opportunity of AI while mitigating associated risks.

Fivetran has introduced its Managed Data Lake Service, designed to automate and streamline data lake management, allowing users to focus on leveraging their data for analytics, machine learning, and AI. The service simplifies tasks such as data ingestion, quality, schema changes, and performance optimization, transforming data lakes into dynamic, efficient, and governed environments. It automatically integrates data from over 500 sources, normalizes, compacts, and deduplicates it, providing features typical of data warehouses on the data lake. Fivetran Managed Data Lake Service is currently available on Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Microsoft OneLake, with key features including automated data integration, standardization on open table formats, continuous maintenance, and robust governance tools. The service offers a free usage promotion from June through August for new customers to try it out.

CIOs and CTOs are prioritizing AI development over data strategy, which is a critical prerequisite for successful AI implementation. They're getting ahead of themselves by separating AI from data strategy, when in fact, AI requires high-quality data built on a well-executed data strategy. Executives need to understand that a strong data foundation is essential for AI success, and that there are no shortcuts. Organizations with a unified data strategy, governed access to high-quality data, and reliable data pipelines are the ones who will excel in AI capabilities.