The History of Big Data and the Future of Analytics with Muji

Big data is a word we’ve heard thrown around for the better part of a decade. This week’s guest is Muji of hhhypergrowth. Muji is a technologist, software developer, and investor who has spent over two decades in the trenches, helping IT departments implement software and new systems. Given the recent IPO of the data company, Snowflake, this episode attempts to review the history of big data. The evolution of big data has gone from on-premise to in the cloud solutions. Snowflake being one of the most noticeable cloud companies in 2020. In this episode, Muji–who has written an in-depth dissection of Snowflake, its technology, its positioning, and how it compares to competitors–shares the history of how we got to this point, and what he thinks makes Snowflake special.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Muji shares a bit about his background in data and how he has watched it evolve.
• The challenge today is corralling the different apps and data sources companies use.
• How companies used to gather and refine data.
• Who provided the software in the 90s, 2000s – Oracle, SAP, IMB, Microsoft,…
• Cloud provides nearly unlimited scale capabilities on both storage and compute, which unleashed a new wave of data and analytical tools.
• About the demise of Cloudera and Hortonworks.
• How Snowflake managed to scale so successfully, from leveraging the cloud to being vendor-neutral and a turnkey service.
• Why he believes Snowflake beat Amazon at its own game by building a turnkey solution on great architecture.
• How to empower customers with a multi-cloud strategy and variable pricing.
• Snowflake’s three layers – a storage tier, scalable compute, and shared services layer.
• The frenemies relationship in today’s cloud economy.
• Muji talks about the rise of analytics and how Alteryx is making analytics simpler.
• Where Muji thinks Snowflake is headed.
• Making analytics easier is the key to unlocking value.
• Why Muji says traditional valuation metrics aren’t important.
• Other companies Muji is paying attention to in the software space.
• Muji’s plan for his blog, hhhypergrowth – he wants to help average investors who don’t have the insights understand these platforms better.