The author reflects on their journey in the integration company, from focusing on the "connected enterprise" to the rise of Big Data and data democratization. They note that while some companies achieved success with data insights, many others struggled to attain these benefits due to complex environments and limited accessibility. The cloud changed everything, making data analysis more accessible through tools like Snowflake and Databricks. Business intelligence also moved to the cloud, becoming more user-friendly with tools like Chartio. However, the increased demand for self-service analytics has led to a new challenge: cloud data warehouses struggle to handle high concurrency and latency issues, causing slow dashboards that are frustrating for users. Legacy technologies cannot meet modern data workloads, and databases like MySQL often fail to scale. SingleStore, a modern distributed SQL database, is introduced as a solution to complement existing data stores and power BI tools, enabling fast refreshes and dynamic explorations of data.