Hello and welcome to the show today.
We're trying something a little different.
I have with me on the call some of our Axway Catalysts.
They are a group experts from around the world who are passionate about digital technology
and the API space.
Guys, go ahead say hello!
Hello.
Hi.
Hey Everybody.
I invited them on the call today to play a little game.
Let's get started.
Alright, before we get started, guys, let's go around the room and introduce yourselves
real quick.
Hello, I'm Eric from Paris.
Hello, I am Emmanuel from Paris, too.
Hello, I'm also Erik - but a different one and I'm not in Paris.
I'm in Zurich.
Hi, I'm Eyal from Toronto.
I'm Brian.
I'm coming to you from the Silicon Prairie out here in Omaha Nebraska, USA.
Thanks Brian.
The game we're playing today is called, Breaking Down "Tech Jargon".
Now you all know what I mean when I say "Tech Jargon" right?
It's why marketing and sales people use words like "enterprise" and "scalable" and "interface".
It's great for when speaking to a very technical audience, but it can be easily lost on someone
who has a non-technical role.
So, help me out here, guys.
For this game, what we're going to be doing, is I'm going to name a somewhat common word
or phrase considered "jargon" and your job is to give me the best answer you can muster.
Sound good?
Now I know you've heard this one a lot.
"Big Data."
What does it mean?
For me is the opposition of structure of data.
It means it is data that doesn't fit on my computer, pretty much.
It's really big!
Velocity, volume, variety.
These are the three elements that makes data qualified as "big data".
Variability is also I think one of those things that goes in there often.It's different kinds
of data that goes in there that you kind of have to align to make sense of them.
I thought it was just data you couldn't put in a regular database so you have to have
a whole new set of solutions, a whole new set of technologies, like Hadoop and you have
to have a whole new way of analyzing it so... or just a big hole somewhere and then you
have a data lake!
A lake, yes!
And then it turns into the swamp.
Of course the swamp, the data swamp.
And of course the reason everybody needs all this Hadoop unstructured, different way of
relating data is because it's big!
It's just SO big.
My data is everywhere, all at once, constantly feeding new events into it.
And astronomical numbers at astronomical velocity.
So how do you deal with all this?
That's it, my mind's blown.
Bye.
So how do you drain the swamp?
With Streams!
But I don't think people still use "Big Data" do they?
The term is probably a little bit too old by now.
So yeah at some point all these terms, it's like they are the height of their hype curve
and then they are just not as sexy anymore.
And of course all that technology you mentioned there - that automatically means that you
can understand the data and its structure and it's meaning and it's metadata and
it's semantics.
It's
just
the technology!
Alright up next the word is, "blockchain".
Blockchain, oh!
Oh I have a memory about blockchain.
It is the first and only time that a CEO of the biggest bank in Europe called me on the
phone and said "I forbid you to talk about blockchain!"
It's a distributed agreement on truth, pretty much as we were saying earlier with events
- it's about distributing truth about the data.
The blockchain is about distributing the truth about the data where anybody can check what
has been considered truth as part of an agreement with a signature from each of the parties.
If you want your transactions to be really, really slow, and really, really expensive,
then move to "blockchain!"
OK - maybe it's not the most expensive one, I would agree to that, but it is super expensive.
You don't use it unless you need it - sorry.
And you pretty much never need it...
So if you want to have philosophy conversations about agreements, blockchain is the way to
go.
Now in terms of technology, I like blockchain a lot when it comes to replacing intermediaries
for clearing and settlements, either of payments or when you buy shares.
It is way more efficient and there is no need for an intermediary to say, "OK, this is the
transaction that happened."
It's written there which is a main reason why most of the clearing houses right now
are investing and should be investing heavily in the blockchain.
Plus it is a huge cost savings because I remember the days when I was at Barclays and the Bank
of America and you'd have whole hundred persons teams dedicated to doing trade matching and
counter parties and checks and breaks, so yeah.
I think it could be good.
What is a blockchain, right?
It is a distributed agreement, it is a fancy ledger, it is the 20th century answer to double
entry bookkeeping, a way to make sure a group of people that agree that something happened,
that some transaction happened, has happened in an irrefutable way.
So that can be powerful for all sorts of things.
Cryptocurrency of course being one of them.
But one of many.
Alright last one!
"Digital Transformation".
So my main thing about that is you can always tell when you talk to organizations, like
in a lot of cases, you really get that vibe that they look at you and they say, "Tell
me how to get over with it!"
You know, "Tell me how to do it, then I can do it and then I can be done with it."
And my main thing is always to tell, them, "No no no, That's a new a way of existing
and you're going to exist like this for the rest of your existence."
I think that is the hard thing for organization to accept: that it's not something you just
DO and then after that you just do whatever you did before.
It's sort of like a diet, right?
It's not like Oh, I'm going to diet for six months and then I'm just gonna go back to
eat hamburgers and French fries every day.
It's like No, no.
You have to eat healthy!
You don't want to do a yo-yo transformation.
That is what we should tell them.
Oh I like that.
A yo-yo transformation.
Um, when
you say diet, I look at
it as something that is temporary and not necessarily nice to go through.
It is technically an adaptation, an adaptation to a new era.
You're a specialist living in a certain ecosystem at some point and your ecosystem entirely
changed because it's been, for example, climate change.
This climate change forces you to totally disappear or adapt.
Now, if you look at the way this word has been used for the past, I'd say, 3-4 years
it was like the key word for positive thinking, about start-up, "Oh this is cool", this is
what you have to do but at the end, it's only when people have thought it through or realize
that any transformation, any change, is painful for them to really accept the digital transformation
that will take them 10 years to go through.
It kind of makes me think of some organizations, some companies, little startups, or big ones,
they're natively digital.
So, when I think about digital transformation, it's the companies who are not really natively
digital or they've got stuff that's leftover from a time when they were not digital natives.
And that's where the struggle happens, I think.
So the things you guys are talking about with the mindset changes, or working differently
really comes into play.
The need to change, and transform.
When we talk about the information revolution, and "the web", people, we're not trusting....I
had people tell me once, "We couldn't put our services on the Internet because the Internet
is for nerds."
So I think we've kind of gone beyond that.
And it's more about how to accelerate that process and how to make it more native.
Not only just for the technology, but the way that you operate as an organization.
You remember the "information superhighway"?
Oh yeah! oh!
Surfing' man!
If all you did was outsource to some specialist team, just barely get your old systems grafted
to this front end that you outsourced anyway, and you think bravo, digital transformation
achieved, you're in for a rude awakening.
It really comes down to deeply looking inside your organization and seeing how your technology
functions, how your technology team functions relative to modern technology companies, and
how
they operate.
So my friends, these are technical experts in their field and the Axway Catalyst Team
is here to help your business make good decisions about why, when and how to transform your
IT infrastructure.
You can reach out to them at any time by going to catalyst.axway.com and schedule a time
to meet with any one of them.
Now there are many more words out there we could easily discuss so we're probably going
to have to do an episode just like this soon.
so be sure to subscribe to our channel, like this video.
We hope to see you back on Hey Axway again soon.
Thank you, take care!