 Welcome to Data Citizens 21. I'm thrilled that so many of you are joining us this year for what I think will be our best conference yet. This is always my favorite moment of the year. What makes it especially meaningful for me at this time is that we've all faced so much uncertainty over the last year. Being able to bring together our community of data citizens, data professionals, customers, and partners gives me so much energy. We all share the same passion to use data to create positive change in our work and in our lives. 2021 has been called the Year of Transitions and rightfully so. The pandemic has changed our lives, our businesses, and our society. It has changed our world. There's been a number of notable shifts over the last 18 months, and I'd like to bring up three shifts that I personally connect to, and these will likely resonate with many of you too. First is the shift towards remote work. At the start of the pandemic, tens of millions of people across many industries transitioned to working from home. This transition happened unprecedentedly fast, and in many cases, it happened overnight. For me, not being able to meet our customers and our fellow co-lebrants in person, especially during such turbulent times, I've actually welcomed over 200 new colleagues, new co-lebrants was especially hard. The second is of course a shift towards online retail. In the US, e-commerce was forecasted to reach 24 percent of total retail sales by 2024. But by July 2020, so four years earlier, it had already reached 33 percent. That has translated into an enormous boost for delivery companies. Finally, the supply chain reinvention. The pandemic revealed the complexity and vulnerabilities in the supply chains of many different companies, from raw materials to freight disruptions to labor shortages. The damage from the pandemic was felt everywhere. For example, my wife and I have been waiting for over six months for a four-year-old daughter's first bike. Now, many companies oriented towards data and analytics to reduce costs and better understand, manage, and optimize their entire value chain. Now, the one thing that all of these shifts have in common is that they accelerated the massive growth of digitization. This transition to digital isn't new, but how much it has accelerated hasn't been easy for organizations. In many cases, this has happened under enormous pressure. That digitization has resulted into related trends. First, an explosion of digital channels, which has created unprecedented amounts of new data. There's more volume and more variety of data than ever before. It's been distributed broadly across organizations. Again, this is not a new trend, but one that has also accelerated. Imagine just the amount of data that is now on TikTok. It's also a great example of the responsibilities and risks that come with all of that data. This brings me to the second trend and risk that we had started seeing even before the pandemic, the creation of evermore data silos. These silos result in disjointed and often ineffective data teams. What is more concerning is that it's often a lack of confidence in the outcome. This leads to an overall lack of trust in the information. We need to solve this. Every day, maybe every hour, every minute, we rely on data to make both transactional and transformative business decisions. Every organization today depends on mission-critical insights and data-critical processes. What happens if suddenly there's a data problem? This could impact our resourcing, our customers, our back office, or entire ecosystem. The integrity and the reliability of data has real, immediate, and long-term implications for our businesses and our reputations, and this will determine the trajectory of our success. We all feel the weight of data, the immense opportunities, and potential implications associated with it. This is a lot of pressure to bear, but I believe that we have the ability to take control of our data, to become more effective in how we work, to be more productive, and to ultimately generate faster and better outcomes. I believe this is a pivotal moment. As organizations transition from reacting to the pandemic to building a healthy new normal, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make good use of our data. By doing so, I believe we can achieve extraordinary things. By making trusted data more accessible and more usable, we can do even more. We can get more out of our work, and we can put more work into it. We can help our organizations serve more customers and enrich more communities. With trusted data, we have the power to change things for good. And with it, there's no limit to what people, businesses, or society can achieve when we are united by data. The world doesn't just run on information. It runs on people living their passion, dreaming big ideas. But without information, without the data, those ideas won't become innovations. That's why at Calibra, we're changing how organizations use data so our customers can change the world. We make data easier to access by making it usable, manageable, and practical. We make it make sense so people have a common language to share and shape their ideas. And no matter how far and wide that data is scattered, we make sure it's all within reach. Connecting the disconnected, joining the disjointed so people can collaborate and trust that their data won't slow them down so they can prove that data has the power to change things for good. Doing more, enriching more, helping more together. With Calibra, you can be united by data. United by data. All of us here are united by our passion for data. We are all data citizens and there's so much power in this community. Uniting is also what the Calibra Data Intelligence Cloud or product does. It unites your entire organization to deliver accurate, trusted data for every use, for every user, and across every source. Managed, trusted, and accessible. These are the crucial elements that will give your teams the ability to easily collaborate and make every data workflow more productive. There's also some of the experience and impacts of our customers. Take Freddie Mac, for example. It's driving their data ecosystem transformation. With 5.5 billion data points and over trillion dollars in assets under management, Freddie Mac leveraged Calibra to support the digital transformation and management of its data ecosystem. They eliminate duplicate data spending, improve data like productivity, and drive enhanced data quality while delivering increased value for their customers. It's also at the heart of what Yelp is doing to connect its engineers to trusted data, unleash product innovation, and instill a data-driven culture. And why companies like Adio and BT are promoting the importance of data culture and making data easily accessible to the data citizens throughout their organization. Over the next couple of days, the knowledge shared by our partners, our customers, guest speakers, and Calibrians will inspire and energize you to keep moving forward as change agents, united by data. Again, I'm so glad to kick off data citizens and thank you for being here with us.