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Guest: Swaroop Jagadish (LinkedIn)
Company: Acryl Data (Twitter)
Show: TFiR: T3M

Acryl Data is the company behind DataHub, an open-source metadata platform enabling people to build a control plane for data using metadata. In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya dives into this month’s topic, Data, with Swaroop Jagadish, CEO and Co-Founder at Acryl Data. He introduces us to the company, its key focuses and takes us through the key trends he is seeing in data. 

Key highlights from this video are:

  • Jagadish explains the background of himself and the other co-founder, Shirshanka Das. He talks about how leading the data at Airbnb led to the formation of Acryl Data and how their fundamental goal was to make data be effective at an organization. 
  • Das started the DataHub project while at LinkedIn before it was open-sourced. Although it started out predominantly being used within LinkedIn, over 1,000 companies have now adopted it. Jagadish discusses the community and contributions around the project. 
  • Jagadish talks about how they believe in creating a 360-degree view of all types of metadata and the benefits of bringing together operational metadata, technical metadata, and business metadata in the same context. He discusses the key capabilities of the platform, such as metadata that is available in real-time and how it enables developers to have the freshest metadata in the workflow.  
  • Acryl Data helps the DataHub ecosystem with an enterprise SaaS product that focuses on two things, enterprise readiness and time-to-value reduction. Jagadish explains the aspects they focus on in time to value reduction, their monitoring framework, Auto Metadata Test, and their intelligence features. 
  • Jagadish talks about the bottom-up approach they take to gain a strong mindshare with data practitioners and how this is a fundamental differentiator and beneficial compared to the top-down approach. 
  • Jagadish discusses the key trends in data saying 10 years ago the data stack was more or less contained with several different platforms; however, nowadays there has been an explosion of categories. Enterprises typically deal with 10-15 stages of data moving through these different phases causing a significant loss in context due to fragmentation.
  • The data team itself has undergone changes, moving away from a centralized team. Jagadish talks about the importance of data practitioners having the data right from the start and why it is crucial to have a unified context across all the different transit points the data is traveling through for the business users. 
  • We are living in a data-driven world with AI and streaming playing an integral role, however, unless you have the right practices in place from the start you will not realize the business impact. Jagadish discusses how focusing on automation and the operational reliability of data are important. 
  • Jagadish shares his advice for organizations talking about shifting left and ensuring data developers have the right tools. Some of their customers have invested heavily in shift left governance and now their business metadata and operational data are enriched in their CI/CD pipelines. He explains how Acryl Data is helping organizations get started. 
  • Acryl Data has a relatively open roadmap but they will be enhancing their monitoring framework with more operational capabilities. They will also be extending their AI capabilities so that you can automatically generate documentation and tags, for instance.  

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.

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