Itamar Ankorion, Qlik | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturung TV. Hey there, welcome back back. Glad that you're here with us here at AWS re:invent.

2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the win at the tech strong Studios private offsite studio with talking to some great guests and I'm being joined today by is tomorrow, who is with click welcome. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me great. I'm excited to get into data and how we can get more access more use to it. Before we do that.

Tell us a little bit about yourself a little bit about the company. Well happy too. So my name is a item alkalion.

I'm the senior of US president for technology alliances at Clique. So I focus on the Strategic integration and alliances and Valley. We bring to customers by integrating with platforms like AWS and others a clique is in the data analytics space.

We've been a leader in that space for a long time. Simply put we help customers get more value from their data. Hey, we help them get data to wherever they want to analyze it and make it ready for analytics and we help them to visualize and analyze the data.

So we have a proper portfolio of offerings which we offer both as a kind of client managed Solutions and now recently with click Cloud which runs as a SAS and we can talk more about that. Okay, great. We'll talk about that announcement in a moment.

I'm curious. Yeah, I've struggled with this problem too myself at times. Is it getting all the data in one location?

Is it getting into a form that you can actually use and process? Is it knowing what you have and what you potentially use for it. Is it all that what are the typical challenges?

Yeah, so it's a great question and and I think us for most customers. It's all it's it's all of that where we specializing is in helping customers and the conics of making data ready for analytics and looking their data bring it to where they want to analyze it. So I think that's with the cloud and you sing it again with all the Innovation coming out new Services New capabilities for data analytics for advanced analytics and machine learning.

The cloud is become a great platform where you can do so much more with your data the challenges customer service. How do I get the data there in an efficient way? How do I get it there in a timely way especially when you need more real time fresh data, and how do I accelerate simplify the process of making the data ready for analytics and in terms of where they want to It it's not necessarily one environment.

I think part of the key things in the cloud is it gives so such a diversity of services? So we have customers that want to bring data into a data warehouse whether it's redshift Amazon redshift or can be snowflake or databricks for example, nor anech on Amazon web services. It can be one of the rdss databases as a service on Amazon.

It can be a streaming environment. It could be a data lake. So so in many customers we actually see when they unlock data they bring it to multiple places because they drive different type of analytics and applications with it from data.

It's always all of the above right because it's everywhere everything creates something else that I want to access to. Yes. So what's the process like of working with you to help get that to a place where people can start to use it and then we'll dive into sap.

Sure. So we've been in the market for you know for many years helping customers. We have over 38,000 customers around the world.

They work very closely with our partners and you know awas snowflake databricks others a we work with system integrators and Regional site partners that help provide solutions to customers. So our customers typically engaged with us directly or through one of our partners and then we focus on making it easy to do business with us and help customers and turn their dating to Value faster. Excellent.

Well you let's talk about sap you came in an announcement during reinvent about something about sap tell us about that. Absolutely. We're very excited about about that.

So, why do we support a lot of types of Enterprise data? We see a lot of demand a lot of potential and opportunity with sap data. So again as a focus, we focused off Enterprise data, but we also focus on the most core Enterprise data customers have I think sap think mainframes, right?

If you're running an sap system or main from system, it's your most important business data is in that system. So you're running your orders you manage your inventory or you know, all the financials so customers who use sap their the most important business data is there so if you want to get more value from data whether directly with the recipe data or whether by combining the sap data with other data, you want to bring it to a place where you can put it all together. So we're seeing an increased demand from customers.

They want to get more value and looking the recipe data. They want to bring it to the cloud and what we've done is we've created a very unique solution for that and we can go into the different things that make it unique but one of the things we also announce this week is the availability of what we call solution accelerators for sap also on clean Cloud on our SAS platform where we all know have the data integration capabilities with cloud. Integration to kind of templates or guides are a way that you can accelerate how how you can get access or use that data.

Yeah. It's a it's a great way to think about it. So if you if you take a step back and look at everything you need to do to get value of sap.

There's actually quite a lot that needs to get done and this is why that's a big charge. Right? And that's why for some customers on those.

They they're not sure how they can can do it. So together with with AWS. It also made it announcement that with snowflake this week.

We create reference architectures for them to understand how they can make it happen, but the solution he put together because it's a few here a key elements one is actually getting the data for the cloud. How can you facilitate delivery of the day of the extraction from sap and the delivery to the relevant data service you want to use on AWS? and again, we do that with high efficiency with all the types of different SAP systems custom may have if they're still on ECC or they're using Hana or as for Hana we have the way to get all the data out very very efficiently including continuously in real time and make it available in the fit for purpose manner in the data service they want The second step is all the transformation because the data is it exists in sap, you know the model in the right way you want to have it for analytics.

So we have take care of all the conversion and transformation of the data to create an Unity the Visa model data model like a data Mart. And then third is we can also look at creating the visualizations that actually had to visualize analyze understand it also with integration to machine learning environments like Amazon sagemaker, for example, now these solution accelerators, it's very think about a prepackage solution. We take very common business needs like order to cash inventory analytics Financial analytics and what we've done we basically prepackaged all the knowledge and best practice that customers would need in order to accelerate success with those kind of initiatives and there's a lot of goes goes into that.

We prepackaged it. It's available to accelerate their proof of concept and presentation process and we just now made it available also with Kelly cloud data integration. Okay, great.

Yeah, certainly. It's kind of heartbeat of the organization kind of information Erp. I'm curious the questions or the things that businesses want to analyze is that changed over the past couple of years with digital transformation moving to more digital experiences focused on customer experience and reliability things like that.

Those are kind of the now that watch words of what we think about in the software that that's a great question. I think it's I think I think for some customers it's doing more for the use of the before just doing it feel faster easier lower costs with what they can do can do in the cloud. I think the more interesting one is really the reinvention and the modernization they're looking to do So for example within the sap text they've done reporting in the past.

But today they want to analyze data from sap and on sap data. Now, for example, we had a Simmons energy as one of our customers and they're bringing data from sap along with data from Salesforce and from Oracle systems they have and they want to bring it all together. So that that's something new and from all the data to try to have new insights, which they haven't haven't used before.

We see customers that are starting to look at real time analytics. So they really it's really important for them to look at the current data, right so it needs to be fed in real time so they can analyze it in real time. We see customers that want to do predictive to combine descriptive analytics along with Predictive Analytics.

So that's integration of machine learning for example into that process. So I think we're seeing a lot of new use cases that go beyond what people have tried to do before that's where experimenting and building it faster in the cloud just made it makes a lot a lot of sense. It seems also to it makes a lot of sense.

It seems also that we're in a business climate where we don't always have to make Grand moves, right? We want to be able to experiment at Market. We would variation of a product in a different Market in a different variation.

I guess the different competitor of what that might be but we won't be able to do that quickly, but we want to get access to the data quickly right doesn't help us to go. Roll that out and then wait six months to find out if it was effective. We want to know that day that week right are we seeing different or the same results or you know, maybe some good or bad surprises in and the experience?

Yes. I think you're heating on a on a very important point for many of our customers which is agility. So again that all these things are new but they can't they can't wait.

Six months and working those kind of iterations. They want to work in much faster iterations that usually takes, you know, very few weeks. So making the data available makes a quickly make a difference and part of what we've built into the platform is also the ability to automate a lot of that transformation process so that the outcome with the business day that's ready for analytics is available faster.

And then if you want to adapt it and change it again, you can apply those changes faster. So part of the whole idea of the software we brought to Market is to help customers innovate faster and be more agile, you know what I got new new Solutions. So that's I think at the lines very well with you know, the what do you describe?

That's right. There's several kind of moves happening like in the observability world with Cloud native and all of that. There's things like observability driven design and the software process seems like we need something similar.

It's that analytics driven design or maybe it's data driven design of what data do we need to be able to Telemetry not just of the but after that time for the experience of the business process where the business outcomes so you can you also know you've got the data you don't have to kind of fabricate it through correcting too many dots correct and and part of the part of our platform also includes a catalog. So when we create all these assets part of what we do is we make the development in the catalog so customers can achieve few things. First of all, they can more easily find you know what they have.

So the catalog is a bridge between the process that makes data available and how I have all these assets available for me. And those those application developers users at one don't know. Hey, what data do I have available?

So the catalog becomes a way to drive more utilization of the data that you actually made available because more people can easily find it. The second element is trusting the data. So how do I know that the data I'm using is actually good data.

It's a data I can use and that's where things like lineage come come in. So where do they come from what happened to it along the way and if I actually look at this number this figure can I can I can I trust it. So all of that is built into the platform that we made available because The customer are looking for fantastic.

Well, very exciting. Congratulations on the launch and the business working folks find out more if they're interested in the sap capabilities or other services that you offer. Thank you first of all, and well a few things if you're if you're here at nms inhibitory invent, I can come visit us at the booth.

We have a lot of experts at the booth with demonstrations of the product. You can also find on a website. That's probably the easiest to go go to a website.

com sap is the Amazon you can find everything there. There's lots of video demos. There's a materials as way to get started and also he'll make it easier to engage our team if you want to start discussing this further we spend we spend quite a lot of time with our experts to help customers with workshops to kind of understand the art of the possible and understand how they can build more than architectures and help them through proof of concept of value to really see.

Hey we can make this work we can within very few days. We can have a data more from sap already running, you know. Data warehouse, you know in AWS.

Well how fantastic that would well great. Check out click that com and find out more about the AWS and sap and I'm sure many other offering some click. Well, thanks for joining us.

Hope you have a good rest of the show. Thank you for having me. All right, we'll be back with another great guest real quick.

So don't go away. Keep checking us out. We've got a lot of interesting topics coming up.

So we'll see you in a few.