Many organizations have considered or experienced a desire to take advantage of a cheaper platform, more feature rich-software, or to divorce from a vendor who is not delivering. But the pain of moving is simply too great to consider doing it. This is the state of being locked-in. In this blog, we explain what lock-in is, what it means for businesses searching for new embedded analytics solutions, and why it should be a consideration when choosing a platform.

At this year’s Snowflake Data Cloud Summit: Data Together Now, customers and partners from around the world came together to explore the transformational power of data and Snowflake’s vision for bringing the world’s data together in the Data Cloud. Over the course of two days and 70 sessions, attendees were inspired by keynotes, learned from their peers in customer and partner sessions, and participated in hand-on labs and technical deep-dives.

In October of 2020 Cloudera acquired Eventador and Cloudera Streaming Analytics (CSA) 1.3.0 was released early in 2021. It was the first release to incorporate SQL Stream Builder (SSB) from the acquisition, and brought rich SQL processing to the already robust Apache Flink offering. The team’s focus turned to bringing Flink Data Definition Language (DDL) and the batch interface into SSB with that completed.

The thing about data is there’s no end to how much of it you can collect and keep. Each day, if you’re like most of the global banks I work with, you’re generating oceans of the stuff. Yet the bulk of it will never be very helpful or even relevant to your day-to-day business decisions.

In a telecoms industry differentiated mainly by service and threatened by churn, gaining access to timely customer data initially drove internal demand for analytics and BI (ABI) reporting. When demand grew beyond customer service, our IT team really struggled to keep up. This set us off on a journey to find ways to help our colleagues to find insights and the answers to their questions themselves.

When dealing with payments, speed is king. Technology is increasing the speed at which innovation happens, and nowhere is that more apparent than how everyday commerce is transacted. Credit cards are now built with tap-to-pay capabilities, if you still even have a physical credit card. Phones have become the new credit card, with data from transactions and mobile banking adding to the overwhelming amount of data that can be collected.

At the end of March, we released the first version of Cloudera SQL StreamBuilder as part of CSA 1.3. It enabled users to easily write, run and manage real-time SQL queries on streams from Apache Kafka with an exceptionally smooth user experience. Since then, we have been working hard to expose the full power of Apache Flink SQL and the existing Data Warehousing tools in CDP to combine it into a state-of-the-art real-time analytics platform.

Cloudera has been named as a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave for Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021. We are excited to be recognized in this wave at, what we consider to be, such a strong position. We are proud to have been named as one of “The 14 providers that matter most” in streaming analytics. The report states that richness of analytics, development tool options and near-effortless scalability are what streaming analytics customers should look for in a provider.

Business intelligence (BI) teams include roles that sound similar at first, but each comes with its own distinct responsibilities and skillsets. By understanding each of these positions, you can build a BI team that delivers the solutions and capabilities to help your organization get the most out of big data.