Guest: Michel Tricot (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Airbyte (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

Michel Tricot, Co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, predicts the omnipresence of modern data warehouses in organizations in 2022. “So we’ll see a massive adoption of this modern data warehouse in 2022. And so because of that, my second prediction is going to be what would be the roles that are going to be required for these companies to actually be efficient with their new way of approaching data? And data engineers are going to be one of the talents to hire for,” quips Tricot.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to our 2022 predictions series. And we have with us once again, Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte. Michel, it’s great to have you on the show.

Michel Tricot: Thank you Swapnil. I’m great to be here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Before we start with predictions, please quickly tell us what is Airbyte all about?

Michel Tricot: So Airbyte is an open source, data integration platform. Meaning that we help any company move data from point A to point B. So moving data from APIs, from, from data bases, from data queues into data warehouse, other APIs, databases, et cetera. So helping make data fluid within organization and in between organizations.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now it’s time for you to pick up your crystal ball and share what predictions do you have for us for 2022?

Michel Tricot: Yeah, so I would say the first one to me is really going to be about the omnipresence of modern data warehouses in organization. I think what we’ve seen over the past few years is that companies understand that they have tons and tons of data assets that are siloed across many, many places. And snowflakes data breaks  are really becoming the central place for them to actually process and extract insights from data. So we’ll see a massive adoption of this modern data warehouse in 2022. And so because of that, my second prediction is going to be what are going to be the roles that are going to be required for these companies to actually be efficient with their new way of approaching data? And data engineers are going to be one of the talents to hire for.

So as we’ve seen in 2016, 2017, where data centers were the role that people were looking for, data engineers are going to be the same because now these companies are actually rebuilding and revamping all of their data stack to actually be the best at leveraging these data assets. The third one is going to be more [inaudible 00:03:10] . The fact that data is and the way it’s been processed with an organization is not going to be just for technical users. It’s going to be more and more available to less technical savvy, but very, very data savvy. And people who have a very strong business understanding of that data. And with the simplicity of data warehouses of tools like DBT now we can enable less technical people to be extremely good at extracting insight and digging very, very deep. And make very, very good decision on that data.

So I call that becoming the common language within inside organization. And the first one is going to be around what is going to be necessary for these warehouses to be efficient and to be leveraged at their best. Which is data pipes are going to be a fundamental. And what we’ve seen over the past few years is that very often people just build a few piece to just data into their existing warehouses. But as companies are using data more and more, getting very valuable insight, they’re going to become more greedy for that data. And so we try to break down more and more of these silos and we will see all the ELT solutions.

Also things around quality observability becoming a key piece of how people structure their data teams and their data value chain. And that’s because now you have a huge piece of your organization that is actually relying on that data to make decisions. So everything about the value chain will change and will become more and more sophisticated.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing these three predictions with us. Now, what is going to be the focus for the company in 2022?

Michel Tricot: We’re an open source data platform. And one thing that people are really asking for is, it can be hard sometimes to manage all your data pipelines. So a big focus is going to be around focusing on the community adoption and the community contribution for connectors. But also providing an out of the box platform that we call Airbyte Cloud that will allow anyone to actually start using Airbyte with either the connector that they build or the connector that the committee has built, or the connector that we are building. And have that fully operated and fully maintained by our team.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Perfect. Michel, thank you so much for taking time out today and sharing these predictions with us and also sharing what the company is going to focus on in 2022. I would love to have you back on the show next year again, and hold a scorecard to see how many of your predictions turn out to be true. And then get the next set of predictions for 2023. But for now, thank you.

Michel Tricot: Sounds great. Thank you very much Swapnil.

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