"Tech Talk USA" with Mark Cusack from Yellowbrick Data

Each week on “Tech Talk USA,” our host Jeff Hootselle sits down with experts in the information technology world. This week, Jeff spoke to Mark Cusack from Yellowbrick Data.Show more

Yellowbrick provides a modern data warehouse for the hybrid cloud.

To learn more, visit https://www.yellowbrick.com

Short company description: Yellowbrick provides a modern data warehouse for the hybrid cloud. The company was founded in 2014, and we focus on solving the most complex data and analytics challenges at the largest enterprises.

What is your competitive differentiator?: Yellowbrick's key differentiator is our industry-leading price/performance. We are typically 10-100x faster than competing data warehouses, and are typically a fifth of the cost. We also have the ability to deploy in private clouds, through public clouds and also at the network edge. Our ability to ingest streaming data at millions of records per second to support near real-time analytics use cases is also unrivaled.

How did you get started in the technology field?: I got into large scale distributed computing during my PhD in theoretical physics. I went on to lead teams as a researcher in parallel and distributed simulation at the UK Ministry of Defence. I then joined a startup in the data warehousing space as co-founding developer which got acquired by Teradata. I've been in the data warehousing business for 15+ years.

What do you consider to be the biggest challenge when bridging the gap between IT and the overall business for most companies?: One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the business has the speed and agility it needs through its IT systems to be competitive while at the same time ensuring that there are IT guardrails in place to ensure security, privacy and governance of sensitive data. Getting this balance right can be tough.

What is the best or most worthwhile technology investment that you have made in the past 10 years?: Without a doubt, it's the adoption of Kubernetes and investment in micro services architectures at Yellowbrick. This investment has set us up to be able to deploy our database software anywhere. In the cloud, at the edge and on our own specialized instance types.

What are the areas of technology that you see as being the most impactful to the business world in the next 5 years?: An emerging area that I think is going to be particularly impactful is distributed cloud. Distributed cloud takes the public cloud software, hardware and services and deploys them everywhere, even at the IoT edge and in on-premises data centers. This provides a uniform set of services everywhere, all controlled through a single control plane. This will simplify the deployment of data and analytics and ensure that analytics is deployed closest to the data.