Walking to pick up your rental car can be a fun experience, particularly if you don't know what sort of car is waiting for you. I remember once walking to the stall assigned to me and finding a custom, limited-edition Camaro. I had that car for two days during a business trip, and I never wanted to park it anywhere. I tried to keep finding reasons to drive; I looked for the farthest restaurants to eat and found the most roundabout ways to get to my destinations. I put as much mileage as possible in that car before I returned it.
The first rule of renting anything, if you want to get the most value out of it, is to keep using it. If you're not ready to use it to the maximum, you are better off not renting at all.
When our customers tell us they are moving to the cloud, I remind them that they are not moving to the cloud; instead, they are renting some cloud space. One of the most critical decisions a business needs to make before they embark on the cloud journey is to ensure that as soon as they rent the cloud resources, they can use it to deliver maximum value for their business.
The basic rule of renting anything applies to cloud data warehouses. They are not cheaper if you lease them for a long time. However, a modern customer has no choice but to deploy cloud-based data warehouses because the underlying data sources have already moved to the cloud. Today, most businesses house most of their source data in object storage like Amazon S3 or SaaS applications like Salesforce. It makes little sense not to process the data in the cloud itself.
In this rent-first world, finding the right data insight and turning it into valuable action for your customers is one of the most important things you have to do. Holding on to the archaic business model of asynchronous decision-making (deciding first, then searching your weekly dashboards to find an insight to justify your decision) will not cut it.
By leasing your cloud infrastructure, you reformatted your entire data stack by removing performance and capability bottlenecks. Data will now flow from your IoT devices through a fast 5G connection to your SaaS applications or object storage at lightning speed. Your Amazon Redshift or Snowflake data warehousing platform will process and store it in its structure tables.
Businesses now need a fundamentally new way to turn data into information and deliver customized, bespoke experiences to their customers.
For years, the excuse for not doing so has been that the data is too complex or not in one place. The rise of cloud data warehouses, as evidenced by Snowflake's massive IPO, show this last excuse is gone. Structured data has moved to the cloud, bringing the complex tables, joints, and relations. But that complexity is where the real value of this data is. The cloud enables organizations to leverage this complexity with unprecedented agility. No one is moving to the cloud because it's cheaper - after all, you're renting the power of the cloud, not owning it - they're doing it to be more agile than on-premises capabilities can support.
If you're not tapping into this agility with a new kind of analytics layer, one that enables you to interactively engage with the full scale and complexity of your cloud data, you're missing the point.
Think of it as renting a Camaro. You wouldn't get something with that much speed and horsepower to simply follow your everyday routine, drive to the grocery store and the post office.
Similarly, you can't invest in a cloud data warehouse and follow your old analytics playbook. It would be best if you had an analytics solution that lets you kill your old static dashboards, interact directly with the data through search, and leverage AI to navigate the scale and complexity of your cloud data. It would help if you had an analytics solution that can handle the massive explosion of data from mobile and IoT today, and coming tomorrow as 5G comes online. And you need a way to consume not just your internal data, but also combine and mash it with external data sources seamlessly to get richer insights.
ThoughtSpot is the only solution designed to make this possible. With SearchIQ and SpotIQ, we were built from the ground up with search, instead of just bolting search to an existing architecture that cannot scale to your cloud. We don't search summaries, averages, or aggregates, but the entire data at the most granular level. We infused AI throughout the platform to help guide your users to anomalies or trends in the data and ask the questions they didn't even know to ask. All of this can be done on a massive scale without sacrificing performance, data governance, or security.<br><br>With ThoughtSpot Cloud, we've made it easier than ever to leverage ThoughtSpot and unleash the full power of your cloud data warehouse. Let us show you how.