Guest: Li Kang (LinkedIn)
Company: Kyligence (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

As this is a very exciting time for the data analytics field, Li Kang, Head of North America Operations at Kyligence, believes that we’re going to see the rise of the metric stores in 2022. He also makes a prediction about what we call ‘Life After Hadoop’. “What that means is in 2021, we saw continued decline of the Hadoop platform. And obviously that’s going to continue into 2022. We can expect CIOs, data teams to continue to de-emphasize Hadoop and remove the Hadoop platform from the production data stack,” says Kang.

Kang goes on to predict that data API will become mainstream in 2022, with an increasing number of businesses pushing data-driven, decision making and analytics with the Data as a Service (DaaS) approach. Check out the video above to know what else Kang is setting his sights on for the year ahead.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to our 2022 predictions series. And today we have with us, once again, Li Kang, head of North America operations at Kyligence. Li, it is great to have you back on the show.

Li Kang: Thank you for having me as well.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Last time, we had you on the show and you shared your predictions. Before we talk about this year’s predictions, quickly remind our viewers, what is Kyligence all about?

Li Kang: Sure. Kyligence was founded by the creators of Apache Kylin. We provide Kyligence cloud product, which provides an intelligent analytics platform layer that sits between data sources and BI tools. So Kyligence features an AI, augmented learning engine, that ensures peak performance and vastly simplified data modeling. So the result is a sub-second query response experience for BI and SQL, and OLAP type of users, even against petabytes of data. We’re headquartered in San Jose, California, and our investors include famous Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors such as Red Point Ventures, Cisco, CO2, companies like that. And we have a global customer base, excuse me, including UBS, Costa Coffee, [inaudible 00:01:32] McDonald [inaudible 00:01:33], companies like that.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Thanks for sharing more information about the company. Now it’s time for you to grab your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for this year.

Li Kang: Sure. We believe this is obviously a very exciting time for the data analytics field. We see there are several trends going on right now. First I will say that in 2022, we’re going to see the rise of the metric stores. We’ve been using BI dashboards, reporting tools for decades. And with the advancement of new data technologies, we are seeing more and more users gaining access to more and more data sets. But keep in mind for any user, from their standpoint, they really don’t want to worry about things like tables, files, whether it’s a CSV file or JSON document. All those kinds of technical details, and all those formulas and the computations. They wanted to work in the business this context. So they would rather to, key business metrics, KPIs, things like that.

So in 2021, we already saw innovative enterprises have started building out metric stores, and we saw some open source projects have been developed. At Kyligence, we built a metric store for one of the world’s largest banks in 2021. So in this metric store, basically the idea is we’re going to capture the key business metrics, KPIs, this kind of information, that hide the complexity of data access and security and governance, and allow the end users to work with these directly.

So look out for the development from whether it’s vendors or system integrators or innovative companies, to deliver more metric stores in 2022. That’s the first prediction we’ll make. Second is we call it Life After Hadoop. What that means is obviously in 2021, we saw continued decline of the Hadoop platform. And obviously that’s going to continue into 2022. We can expect CIOs, data teams to continue de-emphasize Hadoop and remove Hadoop platform from the production data stack. But what happens after that? That’s why it’s called Life After Hadoop. So look for it departments to, they still continue to protect their investment in on-premises solutions.

So instead of just getting rid of Hadoop or HDFS or those kinds of storage and computer framework, people are looking for ways that enable or continue the on-premise environment, whether for regulation purposes or for the cost purposes. But we’re going to see the rise of the private cloud and the hybrid cloud. So you have both your application workload and data on-premises in the private cloud type of setting. And also you have a lot of public cloud to handle some other workloads and data storage. And then the data and analytics product in 2022 needs to better handle this type of enterprise architecture, where customers have both private cloud and public cloud, or some people call it a hybrid cloud environment. So, that’s the second trend we can expect in 2022.

The third scenario is data API will become mainstream in 2022. We can expect an increasing number of businesses will push data driven, decision making and analytics, with data as a service approach. So in that scenario, data is not just a simple data asset. It becomes data product, and with this data product, we’re going to expose it through APIs, with different programming language or web service costs. So this type of a systematic implementation of data APIs that deliver data, metadata and essentially intelligence basically. This, and they can be not only be used for internal data sharing, but also can be used for external consumption or even monetization.

So that will eventually put this data API and data product at the center of many enterprise processes. And so in 2022, we should definitely pay attention to vendors’ response to this trend, and apply the methodologies and principles that traditionally used for application management in the data product and data API domain. So that’s the third trend we predict is going to happen in 2022, that is data product and data API will be more and more popular.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing these predictions. Now, can you also share what is going to be the focus of Kyligence this year, which might also reflect some of the trends that you talked about?

Li Kang: Right. So in 2022, we will continue to deliver, enhance our cloud offering. We are also, enhance the capability for our customers to being able to enable all their business users to deal with data more efficiently and effectively. Things like metric stores. We already build, delivered the first project for one of the world largest banks, and we’re going to continue deliver more metric stores for more customers. We’re also going to better enable our customers across both BI and artificial intelligence, AI type of workloads, based on the single Kyligence platform. So these are probably the two major areas that we see Kyligence be more innovative. More innovations coming from Kyligence in 2022.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Li, thank you so much for taking your time out today and sharing the focus of the company. Of course, these predictions. And also once again, remind us what Kyligence is all about. As usual, I would love to have you back on the show to kind of hold a card and see how many of your predictions turn out to be true for this year, and then get a new set of predictions for next year. But thank you for your time today. Thank you.

Li Kang: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you, so have a good day.

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