Sometimes it takes a while to get to it …
Last year I was opening Data-by-the-Bay and was welcoming/addressing the attendees. Wanted to turn it into a blog post and never got around to do it. Finally … here we go …
Good morning everybody. On behalf of Nitro: Welcome to Data by the Bay.
My name is Roland Tritsch and I am German and I am the VP Engineering at Nitro. And I am a lucky guy.
I am a lucky guy, because in a lot of cases in my career I have been at the right time in the right place.
25 years ago I was with Electronic Data Systems and build one of the first client-server bill-of-material systems based on a relational database. The customer was GM and the database was build by a company called Relational Technologies Inc here in Alameda. If you know the name of the database come and see me afterwards and I will give you one of these unique and incredibly cool Nitro USB sticks. It is a real collectors item. And it is a bottle opener too!
15 years ago I was with IONA technologies and build large-scale, distributed SOA systems using CORBA, SOAP and REST, when nobody really knew what SOA was.
5 years ago I was with the Gilt Group building and deploying one of the first large-scale micro-services implementations in the industry with more than 300 micro-services.
And right now, I am with Nitro and we are at the fore-front of figuring out how to use data engineering and machine learning and natural language processing to turn data and documents into value for our customers. And that means I am lucky again, because …
… you can think and talk about this anyway you like, but people used to say “Software is going to eat the world”. Today I am probably not the only one to say that “Data and more specifically access to good data and the ability to turn that data into actionable insights for the company and the customers is going to eat the world”.
2 weeks ago Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google said “Mobile first is yesterday, AI first is tomorrow” and 2 month ago DeepMinds AlphaGo did beat one of the best three Go players in the world 4:1. This was not suppose to happen for another 10 years. You do not have to be a genius to see that we are at the beginning of something big.
In all cases I was lucky enough to be surrounded by extremely talented and passionated software engineers who maybe did not have all of the answers, but were determined to figure it out.
And today I am here. I am here with all of you. I am a lucky guy. I think we are all lucky to be here. This is the right time and the right place to figure this data/ML/AI thing out.
In Ireland I would say that I am pretty sure that the next 5 days will not be bad. Not bad at all.
If I translate that into american english then I can say that I am convinced that the next 5 days are going to be awesome.
Please feel free to find me later today to talk about what you do with your data. And do not forget to tell me what database RTI actually implemented.
Thanks for being here and welcome again. Enjoy the conference.