 and welcome to Enterprise Data World 2021. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager for Data University. We'd like to thank you for joining this massive event online this year. So many sessions queued up for you. But we have just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people who will be joining the event, all attendees will be muted throughout the event. If you want to network and chat with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so and have set up many ways to achieve this goal. Outside the individual, during the session, you will be able to chat with each other in the Q&A section on the right hand side of your screen. But outside of the individual sessions, you may connect with each other through the event using contacts, matches, stats, and meeting features. And don't forget to check out the discussion boards. This will let you know there will be a Data University host in every session, so don't hesitate to reach out with any questions about the platform or the event. And with that, let me turn it over to Tony Shaw, founder and CEO of Data University, introduce Enterprise Data World 2021 and our partners in the event, Dayma International. Tony, hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. Welcome, everybody, Enterprise Data World 2021, an old digital program, the first time we've ever attempted and thankfully accomplished that. If you recall, if you've been a prior attendee, Enterprise EDW 2021 was unfortunately canceled just a couple of weeks prior to its scheduled date last year in March. If you want to try and remember what a group of people look like or gathered together, this is a picture from EDW 2019 in Boston. This was our exhibit floor. We hope, of course, to be back to that point by 2022, which will be back in San Diego in March. But for the time being, we are old digital and very excited about this week's conference. We have well in excess of 2,000 people currently registered for the event. So we're very happy with that and we welcome you all and hope that you get a lot out of these next few days. EDW is always particularly well known for the education and knowledge component of the event. It's always been an education-driven program, particularly by peer-to-peer case studies and experts sharing their experience. So what you find at EDW is an awesome community of people who are willing to help you, to give you guidance and mentorship. You should feel free to reach out to those folks who look like they might be able to help you. I've noticed in the chat session so far, people very willing to offer assistance and guidance. The other things that take place at EDW, our exhibit floor this year, of course, is virtual, but there's a lot of solution vendors and product providers who would, of course, love to talk to you. I'll get back to them in just a minute. The other thing which is very significant about EDW is that it is an annual opportunity for everybody to gain their CDMP certification, that's Certified Data Management Professional Certification. If you missed the introduction to CDMP on Sunday, you can go take a look at the recording that's there. And during EDW, through to Saturday, we have a pass or don't pay arrangement where you can take the CDMP exams. And if you don't pass the first time, then you don't pay the fee. So the details of that are in your SpotMe app, which is the platform that you're in right now. I would like to mention our sponsors, without whom we're not able to bring you a program of this scale. So please visit their pages, the brochures and literature. Many of them have product demonstration times, some also have virtual meetups, kind of like Zoom calls, live calls and video. There's opportunities to ask some questions, of course, or you can make a direct video call, which you can actually do also from any attendee to another. So there's a lot of features in the platform that we're using this week. Please take advantage of as many networking opportunities as you can. All right. With that said, welcome everybody again. I'd like to hand over to Loretta Maan Smith. One of the many traditions of EDW that I'm delighted we can maintain this year is to kick off the event with the announcement of the Daima International Award winners. Loretta is the immediate past president of Daima International and also the chair of the award committee. So Loretta, thank you very much. Let's see who we're honoring this year. Thank you so much, Tony. It's wonderful to be here again and it's wonderful to be part of an event like this. It is a time and a place where people from the data management community can connect and continue to grow together as an organization and community. For those of you who don't know what Daima International is, I'd like to share a little bit about us. We have a mission as a not-for-profit, vendor-independent global association of business and technical professionals to advancing the concepts and practices of information and data management. So the very topic of this conference is the purpose of our organization. And as such, we try and create an environment for all of our members that allow them to learn and grow and to help the companies that they work with and to help the world in general with data management. One of the ways that we do that is we acknowledge that there are some people and organizations that have a tremendous impact on data. And we do that through the Daima International Excellence Awards. What we try and do is identify a pool of individuals through a nomination process that's open worldwide. This year, we had a large pool of nominees and we spent a fair amount of time going through all of the nominations, verifying the individuals or were willing to share their information, and then assessing the work that they have done that was described in the nomination form. Where necessary, we reached out and got additional detail. And as a result, we can say that there are four winners for 2021. And I'd like to take a few minutes now to just share a little bit about each of them and suggest that you all reach out. All of the winners are represented here and you can reach out to them through chat and congratulate them on their winnings. First, Kathy Rodin. She has had a tremendous career in data management, especially in the public sector. She's had a big impact in helping certify people in the public sector around governance and stewardship. The work that she's done on the Evidence Act and the consolidation and sessions she has put together for Chief Data Officers is amazing. She's a speaker at this conference. Please attend her session. And please congratulate her for the work that she has done in her career for the data management profession. Our second award winner is Ronald Damhoff. His approach towards data management is unique. And the Damhoff Quadrant is a wonderful tool that anyone can use in order to help create the conversations that you need to have on the business and IT side talking about data and what the right simple version of the truth is. Ronald is on the board of directors of, I believe, Daman Netherlands. And we just want to thank him very much for the work that he's done with our community and the work that he's doing with the organizations in the Netherlands and the Dutch Tax Authority. Douglas Ericsson is our third winner. He has had a 45-year career in IT and has done tremendous work in the area of enterprise architecture. His textbook on enterprise architecture really does an excellent job of explaining the Zakhman framework. And he was one of the nominees that had multiple nominations. He actually had three different individuals nominate him. So congratulations to Douglas on the work that he has done. And finally, we have an organization you say this as CIFUs, C-F-I-H-O-S. This is an organization, a non-profit, that has put together a specification for the turnover of capital equipment. Capital equipment, for those of you who are not working in that area, it is large facilities like oil refineries or warehouses. Although, I believe that this specification can be used for any kind of asset that's being turned over. So the specifications that they created are allowing for the communication of data consistently from the phase of development into the phase of ongoing operations. And Philippe Godbelie is attending the conference and available for you to chat with if you have questions about this organization. Finally, what I'd like to leave you with is the fact that Dama International is a community, and it's a community of individual professionals that get together through local chapters and through our worldwide membership. You are more than welcome to look around. You are more than welcome to measure yourself against the body of knowledge that Dama International has created through our certification process. And you're more than welcome to help us grow that body of knowledge as we go into the next version. Please think about taking the time to nominate for next year's Dama International Award those individuals or organizations that aspire to do the best in data management in the world. Thank you so much for the time and effort that you're putting in in your organizations for the community that you're helping us create and for attending this event where you can learn from a wide variety of very, very brilliant professionals and get involved in data management. Tony, I think we can turn over to you. All right. Loretta, thank you. Congratulations to all those award winners. Kathy Rondon, I know personally is just an outstanding professional and I'm always grateful for the collaboration we have with her. We're actually wrapping up our introduction a few minutes early here. So let me just make one small selfish remark, really. Thank you very much for the kudos that folks have offered to our organization. That's greatly appreciated. I feel a little undeserving because the person who has really carried the bulk of the workload in preparation for the conferences are operations manager Kat Parker and it would be remiss of me not to thank Kat publicly in front of everybody this morning because she's got a lot on her plate now and also for the next three days as we all do. But when we get to the end of this she will be the real hero of the production side of things. But we have a wonderful conference ahead of us so much to see and do and people to meet. I will provide an update on the number of total attendees when we get to the final keynote because people are still signing up at quite a rapid click. And we will be kicking off at 8 a.m. Pacific at the top of the hour. 11 a.m. Eastern of course. We look forward to seeing you in the breakout sessions then. Please visit the exhibitors. Most of them will be able to receive your calls or questions from this point forward through to 1.30 this afternoon. And just have a great time. We're going to try and bring as much of the in-person experience to this digital platform as we can. And so I hope you take advantage of everything that's available here. Have a great week everybody.