Enterprise Data Operations And Orchestration At Infoworks

May 4, 2020

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Summary

Data management is hard at any scale, but working in the context of an enterprise organization adds even greater complexity. Infoworks is a platform built to provide a unified set of tooling for managing the full lifecycle of data in large businesses. By reducing the barrier to entry with a graphical interface for defining data transformations and analysis, it makes it easier to bring the domain experts into the process. In this interview co-founder and CTO of Infoworks Amar Arsikere explains the unique challenges faced by enterprise organizations, how the platform is architected to provide the needed flexibility and scale, and how a unified platform for data improves the outcomes of the organizations using it.

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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Amar Arsikere about the Infoworks platform for enterprise data operations and orchestration

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by describing what you have built at Infoworks and the story of how it got started?
What are the fundamental challenges that often plague organizations dealing with "big data"?
- How do those challenges change or compound in the context of an enterprise organization?
- What are some of the unique needs that enterprise organizations have of their data?
What are the design or technical limitations of existing big data technologies that contribute to the overall difficulty of using or integrating them effectively?
What are some of the tools or platforms that InfoWorks replaces in the overall data lifecycle?
- How do you identify and prioritize the integrations that you build?
How is Infoworks itself architected and how has it evolved since you first built it?
Discoverability and reuse of data is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes. How do you address that in your platform?
What are the roles that use InfoWorks in their day-to-day?
- What does the workflow look like for each of those roles?
Can you talk through the overall lifecycle of a unit of data in InfoWorks and the different subsystems that it interacts with at each stage?
What are some of the design challenges that you face in building a UI oriented workflow while providing the necessary level of control for these systems?
- How do you handle versioning of pipelines and validation of new iterations prior to production release?
- What are the cases where the no code, graphical paradigm for data orchestration breaks down?
What are some of the most challenging, interesting, or unexpected lessons that you have learned since starting Infoworks?

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Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

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The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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