 Hello and welcome to Dataversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kemp, and today we're talking to Ravi Shankar, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Denoto. Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at Dataversity and this is my career in data, a Dataversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people who help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to Dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. And today we are joined by Ravi Shankar, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Denoto. And normally this is where a podcast host would read a short bio of the guest but in this podcast, your bio is what we're here to talk about. Ravi, hello and welcome. Shannon, glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. And so Ravi, tell me, so your current job title, what is it again and what is it that you do? I'm a Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Denoto and I run the worldwide marketing for Denoto and have been doing it for the last eight years. And I come from companies like Informatica before this and Oracle. So here at Denoto, we are a data integration and a data management vendor. We have been in the business for the last 22 years and the company is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. And I run the marketing at Denoto from a worldwide basis. So the company itself has 20 different offices across many countries across the globe. And so my team itself has grown from somewhere between as little as six when I joined to more than 10 times that today, present in more than a dozen countries. So I manage all the marketing functions related to product marketing, partner marketing, demand generation field marketing, digital marketing, our own design team and marketing operations. So it's a full-fledged marketing team that we have grown and I'm extremely proud to work with some of the talented people in this industry. I love it. So tell me Ravi, when you were a kid, is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you dream I'm going to be a CMO of a data integration company? No, I was not. I think it just happened. So when I was going back to my high school days, computer science was something that was intriguing. This was back in the late 80s. And having grown up in India, the evolution into the computer, even though in the US it was much ahead in India, it was just basically starting. And I think I did my engineering in computer science. And I was probably, I would say probably the second or third batch that started with that particular degree. It was a relatively new degree when I started early in the 80s. And with that, my goal was to kind of be an engineer, a computer science engineer. And that's what my initial foray was into my career. I was a software developer, and I worked for many companies like in India itself, for BitPro. It was very started. I was one of the first 100 employees over there. You can see today they have maybe 300, 400,000 people. So I was probably very early, the company when it was started. And then moved to the US. And then I did my masters in computer science as well. The first 10 years I was a developer, even going into Oracle, but always my interest has been on the business side. So even though I started my career as an engineer, so I did my MBA from UC Berkeley from the high school of business with the intent of changing over to the business side. And as I've been through that, the marketing aspect of it really interested me. So things that are related to like more strategic marketing, technology marketing, the competitive differentiation. So those are the things that I actually took some effectives when I was at Haas. And then Oracle was a great company to give me the opportunity to ship from being an engineer to product marketing manager. So I made my change to product marketing, and then I handled multiple different functions from their product management, business development. But eventually I found my passion in the product marketing side, which is where I stepped out of Oracle, went into and then managed the function for Informatica, and then that evolved into becoming a CMO, you know, after that. Amazing. So when you were working as an engineer and using that initial degree, you know, what was it about the business side that drew you to it and made you go pursue your MBA? So for me, so it was not just the development of the products and that was the product. But how do you kind of take it to the market? How do you make it from a marketing perspective, from a sales perspective, from a support perspective? How do you basically evolve that? And how do you kind of look at the economics as one of my strong subjects and a passion and looking at the macroeconomics aspect of it and the microeconomics of the firm itself? So all those things kind of interested me quite a bit in terms of looking at it from that particular perspective and to be able to pick up a business publication like Wall Street Journal and be able to understand what they're kind of talking about. So my interest gradually transcended into that particular role. So I wanted to kind of expand myself into not just doing one function of developing the product, but everything associated. Now that you develop the product, how do you kind of take it to the market? How do you sell it? How do you expand it? How do you expand the company? So those are the things that were of interest to me. And I'm kind of powering that through with that. But one thing that has helped me in the business function is having the technical knowledge. So I continue to stay in the software realm, working for Oracle Informatica and Dino Do. And so that gives me an edge in terms of being able to understand the technology very quickly, translating that to the business side. I was just going to ask that, you know, that that's that's very interesting that you do continue to use that initial knowledge and degree in in the advancement and changes. And that's really that's really fascinating to understand the technology friend and the whole business end to end. I would imagine it does give you a very big advantage in your current role. Yes. Yeah. So talking a little bit more about your current role, then, you know, how do you use it in your current role? You know, how are you using data currently, you know, in your current role? I think you extend on that a little bit. Sure. So I have been in the data industry now, I would say, for a good 20 plus years across Oracle Informatica and Dino Do. And it's a very fascinating field. And the digitization of it, I have always felt that in the productivity of the business and the people and you need to automate functions as much as possible in order to drive the efficiency of the people. And one of the aspects of of doing that is to be able to understand the the function and the data related to that. So it is it's a part and parcel of all the work that we actually do, whether you are, you know, in in financial services or manufacturing, retail and so on. Like, who doesn't deal with it, right? So it has become a part and parcel of every business function. And even today, I kind of, you know, hear this about the digital transformation. And I sit back and think, like, which business is not digitally enabled, right? Like even form, everything has been digitally enabled. But still, there's a lot of way to go. So data is a very fascinating field for me. And the more I have been in, one thing that really strikes me is the speed at which things basically transcend. I'll give you an example. When I was at Oracle, I used to do some of the the trends for one of the products that I did in terms of, like, what was the revenue and, you know, provide the forecast for that back to my senior vice president. And in that, we had Oracle database, of course, and Oracle data of our house. And the date and that would be refreshed only once a month. So right now we are in October. So I could see only data related to September. And if I need the October data, I have to wait till November. I don't think we can any business makes that long these days, right? Everything is like up to the minute. So the industry is going to be transformed into using the data more in real time efficiency. And there are a lot of challenges with that. And, you know, and the industry has come a long way. There has been a lot of innovation in this particular aspect of driving the data, but I think it is going to be core and part and parcel of many different the digital transformation efforts in the industry or any company will undertake. Ready to mingle with your fellow data governance practitioners? Join us in Washington, D.C. this December for the data governance and information quality conference five days packed full of new knowledge, new friends and new strategies are yours when you register at DG IQ twenty twenty two east dot diversity dot net. I agree. So in that vein, you know, what is what is your definition of data? That's a that's a good question. So the data is something that you can actually it can be tangible in the sense that you're able to see it. You're able to realize it, use it from that particular perspective. And to me, it is something that the intangible part of it is the value that you derive from it. How do you basically use it? It is it is it is available as a product, but how do you basically employ it for your day to day functions to improve it in yourself, your function, your company? So that basically is the value that gets to it. So to me, like the data transfers, both there's a tangible part of it and an intangible part of it and normal examples would be like, you know, for example, we as a person, we have like the name, address and all those things could be data, but also things that are coming in from machines like these days that are sparing out tons of information about it. So all that is the data that actually comes through. And yeah, there are there are different ways to how do you basically harness it? How do you, you know, use it? And that's where a lot of the struggle actually is because the data has evolved and it's growing at a much more rapid pace. And I think there are a lot of businesses that want to use it effectively, but they're not there yet. I have seen much of that myself. And so, you know, because of that, do you see the importance of data management and the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years and why? Data is going to be fundamental for many of the business functions. Today, data is used. I talk about this evolution that, you know, back in the 80s when IBM and Oracle started innovating like the databases in which you put the data into a particular place to kind of store it. And it was very successful. And in our field, the success creates its own set of problems. Right. So data became very duplicated across multiple different systems. And so they had to bring back the data into a central place, which is like a data warehouse that evolved in the 90s. And even that kind of respond to multiple different ways. And then in the millennium, there was like the unstructured data that actually came in. And there was not a place to put that into a structured repository like a data warehouse or came the Hadoop kind of systems, data leaks and so on. So things, as you can see, are evolving and they will continue to evolve. So anything related to the data is going to evolve. The management is also going to evolve. But as I kind of mentioned, the management is not something everybody has actually mastered to some extent we have. But I think the evolution of the data for outstrips, the innovations that have happened from a management perspective and still we have a long way to go. So I think like the jobs you asked will definitely increase. So right now I get interns from my alma mater, UC Berkeley. And there are these kids doing data science degrees. So they have either as a major or as a minor. So they do learn the statistics part of it, like the programming, the R and Python and all that stuff they do. So they're kind of learning from that perspective. And I think it is a good one because you want to start early in terms of like from a curriculum perspective, feeding the students today to understand the realities of the data and have a career that can span 30, 40 years in depth alone. So I very strongly believe that will happen and not even in the next 10 years, probably going much beyond that data and data management is going to be a very strong field for students to come out and have a career in it. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launchpad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.dataversity.net and use code DVTALKS for 20 percent off your purchase. Very encouraging and definitely makes sense. So what advice would you give to people who are looking to get into a career in data management? The advice is to kind of learn as much as possible the tools that are needed to work with the data. So I talked about like the data is growing by leaves and bounds. As you can see, for example, the amount of data that your iPhone can hold today is much more than the computers that I used about 30 years ago. So that is all because of the amount of the data and the use that is actually driving the evolution part of it. So that is going to increase. So people who are kind of getting into the data side, my advice would be to learn as much as possible about the types of data and about how to harness the data. So that's the intangible part that I talked about, which is where much of the evolution needs to happen. Data is evolving fast, like anything and everything people do. People are collecting the data. But how do you basically harness it? How do you basically use it? How do you make it productive for yourself, for your function or for your company? It's still a long ways to go. There are technologies that are evolving and innovation that is happening. But still, that's where I think coming out with the basics of understanding the data and the tools that they can use today. And they shouldn't stop there. They should be innovating further, coming out into the real world to find new ways to to use the data for even much more productive purposes. So yeah, that's that's advice I would give and I would strongly encourage people who are to go into this particular field and look at some of the degrees that are out there that are very specifically geared towards the data. Just to expand on that a little bit, that's great advice. Where would you advise? Is there some great resources to keep up on the latest in tech and the latest innovations? And how do you keep ahead of these things? One way that I do is primarily, at least for me, because I'm in a marketing function, I tend to go to many of these conferences, industry conferences, one area where I tend to learn. So last week, for example, I was at the Gartner Conference and there they talked about the data in business functions across multiple different industries. So they talked about from whether it is like financial services or retail and so on, but also across multiple functions, whether you're a CIO, the level of data that you need to see, if you are a data architect, the amount of data that you need to do, if you're a business analyst, the data that you need to see, what you need to get out. So there are multiple different ways they kind of talk about and they collect the information talking to multiple different people. So that is one source for me. For others to kind of gain this information, there are again, if you're a student, there are degrees that are out there that you can go and you can do a major or minor in that particular one and learn about it. And for others, there are a lot of virtual courses like in Udemy, for example, and offers courses like these that you can take, that you can learn. Yeah, there are, and again, like some of the business publications, they have like a technology section in which they do talk about how they are using the technology to advance the business and data is part and parcel of those ones. Very nice. And I think it was at one of our conferences, one of our data diversity conferences where you and I met many years ago. That's right. Where you attended in person. Well, Ravi, anything else that you want to add? And I would be remiss if I didn't ask, how does one find out more about DeNoto? You can go to DeNoto.com and then you can look at DeNoto. And so DeNoto, again, as I mentioned, we have been around for the last 22 years now. And so we are recognized as a leader in the data integration magic quadrant by Gartner. And so we are very much in the data integration, data management space. And we have a specific approach to it called data virtualization. And that provides the real-time aspect of the data rather than having to replicate the data which creates the latency and delays the delivery of data to the business users. We basically accelerate the time to data or business user consumption. So that is, so our approach is pretty unique from that particular perspective. So you can go to DeNoto.com and learn more about it. Perfect. I love it. Well, Ravi, thank you so much for taking the time. It's a very impressive career, with your multiple degrees and the different paths and the path that you took to use and learn the full product cycle and get it out there to multiple people. So thank you so much. And thanks to everybody who has listened and all for all of our listeners out there, if you'd like to keep up to date on the latest podcasts and the latest in data management education, you can go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Until next time, Ravi, thank you. Thank you, Sharon. It was great to be here. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks, brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe.