Learn how to integrate data-driven methodologies and machine learning into your business decision-making processes with 'The Art of Data-Driven Business.' This comprehensive guide shows you how to apply Python-based machine learning techniques to real-world challenges, transforming your organization into an innovative and well-informed enterprise. What this Book will help me do Create professional-quality data visualizations using Python's seaborn library to derive business insights. Analyze customer behavior, including predicting churn, with machine learning techniques. Apply clustering algorithms to segment customers for targeted marketing campaigns. Utilize pandas effectively for pricing and sales analytics to optimize your pricing strategies. Forecast outcomes of promotional strategies to determine costs and benefits and maximize performance. Author(s) None Palacio is an experienced data scientist and educator who specializes in the application of machine learning to solve business problems. With extensive real-world industry experience, Palacio brings practical insights and methodologies to learners. Their teaching connects technical knowledge to actionable business strategies. Who is it for? This book is ideal for business professionals aiming to incorporate data science into their strategies and technical experts seeking to leverage machine learning for business scenarios. Beginners to Python can find foundational help, while data scientists will appreciate the focused practical applications. It's perfect for individuals seeking a strong data-driven perspective in marketing, sales, and customer management.

Today I’m discussing something we’ve been talking about a lot on the podcast recently - the definition of a “data product.” While my definition is still a work in progress, I think it’s worth putting out into the world at this point to get more feedback. In addition to sharing my definition of data products (as defined the “producty way”), on today’s episode definition, I also discuss some of the non-technical skills that data product managers (DPMs) in the ML and AI space need if they want to achieve good user adoption of their solutions. I’ll also share my thoughts on whether data scientists can make good data product managers, what a DPM can do to better understand your users and stakeholders, and how product and UX design factors into this role. 

Highlights/ Skip to:

I introduce my reasons for sharing my definition of a data product (0:46) My definition of data product (7:26) Thinking the “producty” way (8:14) My thoughts on necessary skills for data PMs (in particular, AI & machine learning product management) (12:21) How data scientists can become good data product managers (DPMs) by taking off the data science hat (13:42) Understanding the role of UX design within the context of DPM (16:37) Crafting your sales and marketing strategies to emphasize the value of your product to the people who can use or purchase it (23:07) How to build a team that will help you increase adoption of your data product (30:01) How to build relationships with stakeholders/customers that allow you to find the right solutions for them (33:47) Letting go of a technical identity to develop a new identity as a DPM who can lead a team to build a product that actually gets used (36:32)

Quotes from Today’s Episode “This is what’s missing in some of the other definitions that I see around data products  [...] they’re not talking about it from the customer of the data product lens. And that orientation sums up all of the work that I’m doing and trying to get you to do as well, which is to put the people at the center of the work that you’re doing and not the data science, engineering, tech, or design. I want you to put the people at the center.” (6:12) “A data product is a data-driven, end-to-end, human-in-the-loop decision support solution that’s so valuable, users would potentially pay to use it.” (7:26) “I want to plunge all the way in and say, ‘if you want to do this kind of work, then you need to be thinking the product-y way.’ And this means inherently letting go of some of the data science-y way of thinking and the data-first kinds of ways of thinking.” (11:46) “I’ve read in a few places that data scientists don’t make for good data product managers. [While it may be true that they’re more introverted,] I don’t think that necessarily means that there’s an inherent problem with data scientists becoming good data product managers. I think the main challenge will be—and this is the same thing for almost any career transitioning into product management—is knowing when to let go of your former identity and wear the right hat at the right time.” (14:24) “Make better things for people that will improve their life and their outcomes and the business value will follow if you’ve properly aligned those two things together.” (17:21) “The big message here is this: there is always a design and experience, whether it is an API, or a platform, a dashboard, a full application, etc. Since there are no null design choices, how much are you going to intentionally shape that UX, or just pray that it comes out good on the other end? Prayer is not really a reliable strategy.  If you want to routinely do this work right, you need to put intention behind it.” (22:33)  “Relationship building is a must, and this is where applying user experience research can be very useful—not just for users, but also with stakeholders. It’s learning how to ask really good questions and learning the feelings, emotions, and reasons why people ask your team to build the thing that they’ve asked for. Learning how to dig into that is really important.” (26:26)

Links Designing for Analytics Community Work With Me Email Record a question

Summary The data ecosystem has been growing rapidly, with new communities joining and bringing their preferred programming languages to the mix. This has led to inefficiencies in how data is stored, accessed, and shared across process and system boundaries. The Arrow project is designed to eliminate wasted effort in translating between languages, and Voltron Data was created to help grow and support its technology and community. In this episode Wes McKinney shares the ways that Arrow and its related projects are improving the efficiency of data systems and driving their next stage of evolution.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the leading end-to-end Data Observability Platform! Trusted by the data teams at Fox, JetBlue, and PagerDuty, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, dbt models, Airflow jobs, and business intelligence tools, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks to just minutes. Monte Carlo also gives you a holistic picture of data health with automatic, end-to-end lineage from ingestion to the BI layer directly out of the box. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. Data engineers don’t enjoy writing, maintaining, and modifying ETL pipelines all day, every day. Especially once they realize 90% of all major data sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Adwords, Facebook, Spreadsheets, etc., are already available as plug-and-play connectors with reliable, intuitive SaaS solutions. Hevo Data is a highly reliable and intuitive data pipeline platform used by data engineers from 40+ countries to set up and run low-latency ELT pipelines with zero maintenance. Boasting more than 150 out-of-the-box connectors that can be set up in minutes, Hevo also allows you to monitor and control your pipelines. You get: real-time data flow visibility, fail-safe mechanisms, and alerts if anything breaks; preload transformations and auto-schema mapping precisely control how data lands in your destination; models and workflows to transform data for analytics; and reverse-ETL capability to move the transformed data back to your business software to inspire timely action. All of this, plus its transparent pricing and 24*7 live support, makes it consistently voted by users as the Leader in the Data Pipeline category on review platforms like G2. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/hevodata and sign up for a free 14-day trial that also comes with 24×7 support. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Wes McKinney about his work at Voltron Data and on the Arrow ecosystem

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you are building at Voltron Data and the story behind it? What is the vision for the broader data ecosystem that you are trying to realize through your investment in Arrow and related projects?

How does your work at Voltron Data contribute to the realization of that vision?

What is the impact on engineer productivity and compute efficiency that gets introduced by the impedance mismatches between language and framework representations of data? The scope and capabilities of the Arrow project have grown substantially since it was first introduced. Can you give an overview of the current features and extensions to the project? What are some of the ways that ArrowVe and its related projects can be integrated with or replace the different elements of a data platform? Can you describe how Arrow is implemented?

What are the most complex/challenging aspects of the engineering needed to support interoperable data interchange between language runtimes?

How are you balancing the desire to move quickly and improve the Arrow protocol and implementations, with the need to wait for other players in the ecosystem (e.g. database engines, compute frameworks, etc.) to add support? With the growing application of data formats such as graphs and vectors, what do you see as the role of Arrow and its ideas in those use cases? For workflows that rely on integrating structured and unstructured data, what are the options for interaction with non-tabular data? (e.g. images, documents, etc.) With your support-focused business model, how are you approaching marketing and customer education to make it viable and scalable? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Arrow used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Arrow and its ecosystem? When is Arrow the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Arrow?

Contact Info

Website wesm on GitHub @wesmckinn on Twitter

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Voltron Data Pandas

Podcast Episode

Apache Arrow Partial Differential Equation FPGA == Field-Programmable Gate Array GPU == Graphics Processing Unit Ursa Labs Voltron (cartoon) Feature Engineering PySpark Substrait Arrow Flight Acero Arrow Datafusion Velox Ibis SIMD == Single Instruction, Multiple Data Lance DuckDB

Podcast Episode

Data Threads Conference Nano-Arrow Arrow ADBC Protocol Apache Iceberg

Podcast Episode

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Sponsored By: Atlan:

Have you ever woken up to a crisis because a number on a dashboard is broken and no one knows why? Or sent out frustrating slack messages trying to find the right data set? Or tried to understand what a column name means?

Our friends at Atlan started out as a data team themselves and faced all this collaboration chaos themselves, and started building Atlan as an internal tool for themselves. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more.

Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription.a href="https://dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo"…

We talked about:

Nikola’s background Making the first steps towards a transition to BI and Analytics Engineering Learning the skills necessary to transition to Analytics Engineering The in-between period – from Marketing to Analytics Engineering Nikola’s current responsibilities Understanding what a Data Model is Tools needed to work as an Analytics Engineer The Analytics Engineering role over time The importance of DBT for Analytics Engineers Where can one learn about data modeling theory? Going from Ancient Greek and Latin to understanding Data (Just-In-Time Learning) The importance of having domain knowledge to analytics engineering Suggestion for those wishing to transition into analytics engineering The importance of having a mentor when transitioning Finding a mentor Helpful newsletters and blogs Finding Nikola online

Links:

Nikola's LinkedIn account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-maksimovic-40188183/

ML Zoomcamp: https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/mlbookcamp-code/tree/master/course-zoomcamp

Join DataTalks.Club: https://datatalks.club/slack.html

Our events: https://datatalks.club/events.html

Why is Google Analytics 4 the most modern data model available for digital marketing analytics? Rather than simply reporting what has happened, GA4's new cloud integrations enable more data activation, linking online and offline data across all your streams to provide end-to-end marketing data. This practical book prepares you for the future of digital marketing by demonstrating how GA4 supports these additional cloud integrations. Author Mark Edmondson, Google developer expert for Google Analytics and Google Cloud, provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of GA4 and its cloud integrations. Data, business, and marketing analysts will learn major facets of GA4's powerful new analytics model, with topics including data architecture and strategy, and data ingestion, storage, and modeling. You'll explore common data activation use cases and get the guidance you need to implement them. You'll learn: How Google Cloud integrates with GA4 The potential use cases that GA4 integrations can enable Skills and resources needed to create GA4 integrations How much GA4 data capture is necessary to enable use cases The process of designing dataflows from strategy through data storage, modeling, and activation How to adapt the use cases to fit your business needs

Should you consider building a Data App?

How many times has your product team asked for data science models to be available in realtime to serve feature flags and product recommendations to customers? They don’t, but they should, and with data apps the data team can make this a reality.

Join TJ Murphy of Multi Media LLC, Kevin Chao from Ramp, and Tejas Manohar from Hightouch to hear examples of data apps in the real world. Their aim is to give data practitioners a framework for when and why to use the warehouse for production applications, and why the data team is the right team for this undertaking.

TJ will walk through the data apps he built at Minted, including a user personalization service and marketing automation tools. At Minted, the data team supported a GraphQL layer on top of the warehouse that supported both web and mobile app personalization on a per user basis.

Kevin Chao will share how Ramp, a fintech leader valued at $8B, is using dbt and Hightouch to power compliance via Snowflake as the source of truth.

Tejas will share how Supr Daily, the Instacart of India, runs product recommendations in their mobile app and automatically sends push notifications at opportune moments to convert users at a higher rate.

Lastly, TJ will give a practical overview of architecture, and a checklist of what to think through before building a Data App.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LMuuuvVy3QD2ZAltp5c1Eh5Ik4LgM0q-AMlThsZVR40/edit#slide=id.g166573b6b47_0_0

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

As your business and number of product lines grow, the out-of-the-box lead scoring in CRM tools starts becoming difficult to work with and lead scoring becomes that more important for sales teams. Join Ben Lewinsky as he shows how Culture Amp approaches multi-product lead scoring in their data warehouse using dbt.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NOyZLs1QUf6HQqF6jusx32OjUb-Gi-PTnmiDQ8EFKM8/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

If you’re anything like me, you have a love/hate relationship with marketing. Marketing can be delightful, obnoxious or somewhere in-between, depending on content and context. Most of us remember an ad from our youth that has given us a life-long emotional connection to a brand or product. Most of us also remember that obnoxious sales call or email campaign that made us swear never to buy from the offending company again. In this episode of Leaders of Analytics, you will learn from Ikechi Okoronkwo why data-driven marketers have a leg-up when it comes to designing and executing impactful campaigns that hit the right audiences and create delight. Ikechi is Executive Director, Managing Partner and Head of Business Intelligence & Analytics at Mindshare. Mindshare is a global media and marketing agency, and part of global marketing powerhouse GroupM. Listen to this episode to learn: What Ikechi sees as the biggest opportunities in data-driven marketingWhat kinds of analytics to invest in to optimise the impact of your marketing effortsWhat kinds of data is needed to take advantage of these opportunities, and how to collect itHow Ikechi and colleagues use data and analytics to distinguish between rational and emotional reactions to advertisingHow to drive a culture of experimentation and measurement among colleagues and stakeholders who are more creatively than analytically minded, and much more.Ikechi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ikechi-okoronkwo-0318579/

In this episode, Jason talks to Dr. Tiffany Perkins-Munn, the Head of Marketing, Data, and Analytics for JP Morgan Chase. They discuss the role of critical thinking in data and analytics, how to use critical thinking to move from vision to outcome and if critical thinking is a skill that can be learned. Tiffany shares her brilliant experience and Ph.D. expertise, the importance of finding a balance between critical thinking and quick progression, and why being willing to question everything through critical thinking can open up to great new ideas and possibilities.

Send us a text Part 2: Money Ball yet again! Nancy Hensley, Chief Marketing Officer for Stats Perform, talks sports analytics offerings, what sports use data the best, AND find out which gender is better at sports analytics. I wonder...

Show Notes 00:45 Optivision06:57 Which sport gets data? The NFL? 15:48 Was Covid good or bad for business?19:16 Which gender is better at Sports Analytics??!21:45 Guess who Nancy is related to?Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyhensley/ Website: https://statsperform.com/

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.  Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

This IBM® Redpaper™ publication is a comprehensive guide that covers the IBM Power System S922 (9009-22A), IBM Power System S914 (9009-41A), and IBM Power System S924 (9009-42A) servers that support IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. The objective of this paper is to introduce the major innovative Power S914, Power S922, and Power 924 offerings and their relevant functions: The new IBM POWER9™ processor, which is available at frequencies of 2.3 - 3.8 GHz, 2.8 - 3.8 GHz, 2.9 - 3.8 GHz, 3.4 - 3.9 GHz, 3.5 - 3.9 GHz, and 3.8 - 4.0 GHz. Significantly strengthened cores and larger caches. Two integrated memory controllers that double the memory footprint of IBM POWER8® servers. Integrated I/O subsystem and hot-pluggable Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Gen4 and Gen3 I/O slots. I/O drawer expansion options offer greater flexibility. Support for Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) 2.0. New IBM EnergyScale™ technology offers new variable processor frequency modes that provide a significant performance boost beyond the static nominal frequency. This publication is for professionals who want to acquire a better understanding of IBM Power Systems™ products. The intended audience includes the following roles: Clients Sales and marketing professionals Technical support professionals IBM Business Partners Independent software vendors (ISVs) This paper expands the current set of IBM Power Systems documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 systems. This paper does not replace the current marketing materials and configuration tools. It is intended as an extra source of information that, together with existing sources, can be used to enhance your knowledge of IBM server solutions.

In today’s episode, we’re talking to Baskar Agneeswaran, CEO and Co-Founder at Vajro, a cloud-based mobile commerce platform for building high-converting mobile apps for online stores.   We talk about Baskar’s and Vajro’s background, how it’s possible to build an app within 60 minutes, and how smartphones might evolve over the next 15 years. Baskar also shares the marketing and sales models used by his company.   We discuss the difference between companies that have sales as a growth engine and those that have marketing as a growth engine, and how to strike a balance between these and the product itself. Baskar shares some of the lessons he’s learned scaling a company like Vajro. He also explains the different phases of growth.   Finally, we talk about the importance of diversity and how to balance that with alignment around a core mission.   This episode is brought to you by Qrvey The tools you need to take action with your data, on a platform built for maximum scalability, security, and cost efficiencies. If you’re ready to reduce complexity and dramatically lower costs, contact us today at qrvey.com. Qrvey, the modern no-code analytics solution for SaaS companies on AWS. 

In this article, Lawson Abinati lays out core principles for market positioning that apply across all industries, as well as to Business Intelligence (BI) professionals. Although many business intelligence (BI) managers see themselves as technologists first, unless they understand the soft skills of sales, marketing, and communication, they won't succeed professionally or make good on their organization's investments in BI. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/what-is-positioning-and-why-is-it-important

Send us a text Money Ball is back! Nancy Hensley, Chief Marketing Officer for Stats Perform, gives us the latest on data analytics in sports. If you like sports don't listen unless you have time to be entertained. Show Notes 04:09 What does Money Ball look like now?07:30 Mrs Chicago's personal update08:40 Fan website: The Analyst11:16 Stats Perform for the rest of us17:25 Sports tech competitors18:34 Monetizing data. $115M for NFL data! What?27:44 Broadcaster and PressboxLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyhensley/ Website: https://statsperform.com/ Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun. Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

Multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, matched market testing. Are these the three Ms of marketing measurement (Egad! The alliteration continues!)? Seriously. What's with all the Ms here? Has anyone ever used experimentation to build a diminishing return curve for the impact of a media measurement technique based on how far along in the alphabet the letter of that technique is? Is "M" optimal?! Trust us. You will look back on this description after listening to this episode with John Wallace from LiftLab and find it… at least mildly amusing. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication is a guide to IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity featuring Power Enterprise Pools (PEP) 2.0. This technology enables multiple servers in an to share base processor and memory resources and draw on pre-paid credits when the base is exceeded. Previously, the Shared Utility Capacity feature supported IBM Power E950 (9040-MR9) and IBM Power E980 (9080-M9S). The feature was extended in August 2020 to include the scale-out IBM Power servers that were announced on 14 July 2020, and it received dedicated processor support later in the year. The IBM Power S922 (9009-22G), and IBM Power S924 (9009-42G) servers, which use the latest IBM POWER9™ processor-based technology and support the IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux operating systems (OSs), are now supported. The previous scale-out models of Power S922 (9009-22A), and Power S924 (9009-42A) servers cannot be added to an enterprise pool. With the availability of the IBM Power E1080 (9080-HEX) in September 2021, support for this system as part of a Shared Utility Pool has become available. The goal of this book is to provide an overview of the solution's environment and guidance for planning a deployment of it. The book also covers how to configure IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity. There are also chapters about migrating from PEP 1.0 to PEP 2.0 and various use cases. This publication is for professionals who want to acquire a better understanding of IBM Power Systems Private Cloud, and Shared Utility Capacity. The intended audience includes: Clients Sales and marketing professionals Technical support professionals IBM Business Partners This book expands the set of IBM Power documentation by providing a desktop reference that offers a detailed technical description of IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility Capacity.

Python is an ideal choice for accessing, manipulating, and gaining insights from data of all kinds. Python for Data Science introduces you to the Pythonic world of data analysis with a learn-by-doing approach rooted in practical examples and hands-on activities. Youâ??ll learn how to write Python code to obtain, transform, and analyze data, practicing state-of-the-art data processing techniques for use cases in business management, marketing, and decision support. You will discover Pythonâ??s rich set of built-in data structures for basic operations, as well as its robust ecosystem of open-source libraries for data science, including NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib, and more. Examples show how to load data in various formats, how to streamline, group, and aggregate data sets, and how to create charts, maps, and other visualizations. Later chapters go in-depth with demonstrations of real-world data applications, including using location data to power a taxi service, market basket analysis to identify items commonly purchased together, and machine learning to predict stock prices.

We've always said that the genesis of this podcast was the lobby bar of analytics conferences across multiple continents, and this year's Marketing Analytics Summit in Las Vegas was a reminder of our roots on that front. All three co-hosts made the trip to Caesars Palace for the event. Moe presented on bringing a product mindset to analytics (by "presented on," we mean "workshopped content for a future podcast episode"), and the closing keynote was a recording of the show in front of a live (and thoughtful and engaged) audience. Give it a listen, and it will almost be like you were there! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

In today’s episode of SaaS Scaled, we’re talking to Maria Thomas. Maria is Chief Product Officer at Buffer, a SaaS company building a social media and organic marketing platform for small businesses. Maria focuses on the design elements of marketing and engineering.    We chat about the main problems Buffer solves and how it came into being, and Maria talks about the importance of transparency within SaaS companies and the benefits of being a value-driven company.   We go on to discuss the future — how are Web3, decentralization, and other emerging technologies changing the way the internet works and how people monetize their work? Maria talks about vision and how Buffer defines its vision in a more narrow sense.   This episode is brought to you by Qrvey The tools you need to take action with your data, on a platform built for maximum scalability, security, and cost efficiencies. If you’re ready to reduce complexity and dramatically lower costs, contact us today at qrvey.com. Qrvey, the modern no-code analytics solution for SaaS companies on AWS. 

This IBM® Redbooks® Product Guide publication describes the IBM FlashSystem® 5200 solution, which is a next-generation IBM FlashSystem control enclosure. It is an NVMe end-to-end platform that is targeted at the entry and midrange market and delivers the full capabilities of IBM FlashCore® technology. It also provides a rich set of software-defined storage (SDS) features that are delivered by IBM Spectrum® Virtualize, including the following features: Data reduction and deduplication Dynamic tiering Thin provisioning Snapshots Cloning Replication Data copy services Transparent Cloud Tiering IBM HyperSwap® including 3-site replication for high availability (HA) Scale-out and scale-up configurations further enhance capacity and throughput for better availability. The IBM FlashSystem 5200 is a high-performance storage solution that is based on a revolutionary 1U form factor. It consists of 12 NVMe Flash Devices in a 1U storage enclosure drawer with full redundant canister components and no single point of failure. It is designed for businesses of all sizes, including small, remote, branch offices and regional clients. It is a smarter, self-optimizing solution that requires less management, which enables organizations to overcome their storage challenges. Flash has come of age and price point reductions mean that lower parts of the storage market are seeing the value of moving over to flash and NVMe--based solutions. The IBM FlashSystem 5200 advances this transition by providing incredibly dense tiers of flash in a more affordable package. With the benefit of IBM FlashCore Module compression and new QLC flash-based technology becoming available, a compelling argument exists to move away from Nearline SAS storage and on to NVMe. With the release of IBM FlashSystem 5200 Software V8.4, extra functions and features are available, including support for new Distributed RAID1 (DRAID1) features, GUI enhancements, Redirect-on-write for Data Reduction Pool (DRP) snapshots, and 3-site replication capabilities. This book is aimed at pre-sales and post-sales technical support and marketing and storage administrators.