Mark Rittman is joined by Timo Elliott, originally of Business Objects and now Innovation Evangelist for SAP, to talk about the origins of self-service BI with Business Objects' innovative "Universe" and the role analytics now plays within SAP; why analytics is the most important function within your organization and why the vast majority of analytics is still reporting (which isn't so bad); and the role AI and other innovations will play in analytics going in the future.Timo's Elliott Business Analytics and Digital Business Blog"Analytics Is The Most Important Business Process in Your Organization!""The Vast Majority of Analytics is Still Reporting (And That’s Not So Bad)""What is the Story of Business Objects" (Quora answer)

Mark Rittman is joined by Kevin Madden and Josh Feingold to talk about graph + spatial analytics, Tom Sawyer Software ... and why a tweet about a certain WiFi kettle incident went viral last October.Visualizing When a Tweet Goes ViralHow a Tweet Went Viral - BIWA Summit 2017English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle (The Guardian)The iKettle, the Eleven-Hour Struggle to Make a Cup of Tea, and Why It Was All About Data, Analytics and Connecting Things TogetherTom Sawyer Software Perspectives

Mark Rittman is joined by Daniel Mintz from Looker to talk about BI and analytics on Google BigQuery, data modelling on the new generation of cloud-based distributed-data warehousing platforms, and Looker's re-introduction of semantic models to big data analytics developers.

Mark Rittman is joined by Craig Stewart to talk about application and data integration, ODI and Sunopsis, SnapLogic's approach to hybrid on-premise/cloud integration and the rise of data preparation and dataflow-based cloud integration tools.

Mark Rittman is joined by Independent Consultant Chris Webb to talk about MDX & DAX, MSAS and SQL SQL Server and the fall ... and rise, of Microsoft BI

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by MapR's Tugdall Grall to talk about MapR's platform differentation and relationship with open-source Hadoop, scaling and streaming, microservices, and MapR's platform strategy around big data workloads in the cloud.

Mark Rittman is joined by Elastic's Mark Walkom to talk about Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and the Elastic Stack; business models built-around an open-source software core; and their move into cloud services with Elastic Cloud

Mark Rittman is joined by Vasu Murthy, Oracle's Senior Director for Product Management of Oracle Business Analytics to talk about what's new with OBIEE and Oracle Data Visualization and the recently released Oracle Analytics Cloud, a dive into the technical architecture of these new additions to Oracle's BI platform, and Oracle's vision for hybrid on-prem/cloud analytics.

Mark Rittman is joined by Gartner analyst and ex-Oracle Database Cloud Service PM Rick Greenwald to talk about IT’s continuing (and essential!) role in corporate BI&DW deployments and the debate around Mode1 vs. Mode2 Analytics, how we got here, and the future of data warehousing database platforms as we move into the cloud.