Daniel Torbellino (Hitachi Pentaho) among the protagonists of the Data Management Summit Tour Barcelona

We are unveiling day after day all those professionals who will participate with their presentations at the most important event in Data Management. For the first time a forum tries to focus on Data Management in its entirety, from governance, through security, cloud, machine learning, data virtualization and much more. Today we introduce Daniel Torbellino from Hitachi Pentaho.

Tell us a little bit about your career path.

You could say of my 20+ year career path that it fits a circular economy pattern, reusing everything, including my first work experience, to continue to make me grow as a professional.

So, starting at the beginning or at the present time makes no difference other than the degree of understanding, business approach and experience. So, as the saying goes, “all’s well that begins well…”.

The most difficult subject of my career, Telecommunications Engineering Degree, was called Digital Information Theory, with its corollary, Digital Information Theory Application Practices. Said this way it will tell you little, but I am sure that now it would be called Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence and Practical Application of AI, and now it makes more sense.

The subject marked me so much that I decided to base my final project, and therefore my first job as an engineer, on these algorithms that I learned to apply, based on trial and error, JAVA and some Matlab (Python was not fashionable) to the world of Marketing to help decide on which prospects to devote more resources to obtain a greater number of loyal customers.

From there I went on to develop an Operations Support System, another strange name, which we would now call Fleet Management, where I learned to love my second passion, the Internet of Things, those data not so easy to obtain and govern, but which provide a differential business value for many markets.

My time at Indra taught me that what I really liked was to tell stories, to be able to be in front of a customer and discover together how to solve a challenge in their business and create sales plans to make my solution spread across a geography. I was part of the creation of one of the first clouds in Spain, taking partner relationships to the next level or creating new ones, as well as developing new lines of business.

In VMware I was able to experience all this, learn with friends and get the necessary experience to consider myself useful in Software Solutions Business Development, for now in the world of cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity or workplace transformation. With a lot of focus on the public sector I helped to build one of the first shared clouds in the public sector, set up another one for hospitals or modernize the management of postal delivery agents.

Cisco gave me the opportunity to start putting it all together by letting me lead the pre-sales of Smart Cities solutions in Europe. A great experience learning how data obtained from various sensors around a city could add value to a city, being able to improve traffic and parking in Athens, control the tourist center of Prague to measure environmental health or streamline waste collection in several cities in the UK were some of the use cases in which I was involved. Experience that I was able to share with many more people thanks to my position as an associate professor at MIOTI.

And all this experience in the world of data, use cases, storytelling, AI algorithms has led me to lead pre-sales at Hitachi Pentaho for Iberia and MEA. More mature now I realize how important Data Management is so that it can be converted into information, and thus impact business decisions. From fully managing the operations of tens of thousands of service workers, to border control, to predictive infrastructure maintenance, to improving employment through algorithms, to analyzing critical international flight data, to, of course, managing smart cities and regions, Pentaho has been helping nearly 75% of Fortune 100 companies and all those who have put their trust in us for more than 15 years.

Do you think companies have the right culture to manage data?

There are as many answers to this question as there are companies in the world, or at least as many business sectors.

What are constant are evolution and acceleration.

Evolution has been occurring since the era of “Data Valuation” when many Wall Street firms realized that their insurers did not cover their data because it was simply not considered an asset. Since then many standards, such as DAMA, and many more tools, have equipped IT teams, and increasingly business teams, to manage their data in an increasingly professional manner. In this event, for example, we will talk about Data Mesh, probably the most sophisticated, simple and challenging way to manage your data.

The acceleration has been brought by Artificial Intelligence.

In my talks I usually talk about the fact that, despite the large amount of data that is created, very little is actually used (5% said IDC) and perhaps more serious, the disparity between demand and supply of datasets with reliable and quality data, according to the article arXiv:2211.04325, the demand is growing at 50% and the generation at 7%.

Making your data more reliable, high quality and accessible to those who can add value to it is what we at Hitachi call “Data Fitness”, after our vision of Data Fitness or DataFit.

If you add to that the AI boom that has brought the irruption of Generative AI in the consumer world, you have the perfect accelerator for a fuel and a fuel that little needed to give value to the company.

How are you approaching data management in your company what are the most important challenges you are facing right now.

I can’t answer directly for our CDO, as I am in the business development area and not in our data office, but as we use our own products on the IT side, in many of our industries and we are a manufacturer of data management products, I will dare to share a couple of ideas.

The first one is very basic, knowing what data you have, but knowing it like Latin declensions or multiplication tables, is what we now usually call discovery and “observability” (I don’t think it’s in the RAE…yet) of the data. And believe me it’s not that easy in a hybrid multi-cloud era with more and more SaaS services and technical knowledge in the business.

The second one has a bit more crumb. Trust in Data. According to IDC (IDC’s Data Trust Survey), as we move data from operational systems to analytics systems, and AI can be the further analytics system, trust in Data is lost (up to 40%) and at the same time notes that over 60% of respondents say that trust in data positively impacts the business. And within this concept, quality, lineage and regulatory compliance come together, which is nothing.

If you couple these two with a well-defined business glossary or glossaries that help you break down silos through collaboration, you open the door to data democratization and self-service, which can increase the value of your data assets by 10x.

We are fortunate to have you on the roundtable entitled: “Challenges and Opportunities of Distributed Data Architecture: Exploring Data Fabric, Data Mesh and Open Platforms” interesting argument?

For me it is a pleasure and an honor to be part of this table, and I think Hitachi Pentaho could not participate in a table where we can learn and contribute more than talking about data management paradigms and their platforms.

As I revealed in the previous question, we are manufacturers of Data Management solutions, and we have been for more than 15 years, in fact the term Data Lake was coined within Pentaho, and we have helped thousands of companies in their transformation from DWH, the irruption of Big Data, Streaming Data, the beginning of the Data LakeHouse up to the current explosion of the AI (my God, what anglicisms and acronyms in a single sentence, if my mother saw it, she would tell me to write it “as God commands” and repeat it at least 1000 times).

With this accumulated experience, this applied innovation, this willingness to help, we are incorporating in the market this practice of putting, of having the data in shape, this Data Fitness, DataFit that we apply in our clients and that I hope to be able to share some brushstrokes during the table, since it is key for any data strategy, more if possible the more distributed it is.

You have supported the event from the beginning… Why is the Data Management Summit so important?

In fact, we participated for the first time when there was only one event in Spain and one in Italy, and now it has become a benchmark in both countries. Our most sincere congratulations.

As a company strategy, last year we were at one of those massive events where you have your stand, give a commercial talk and hopefully someone approaches you to ask you about your product.

I only had to be there for one morning to realize that it was much more oriented to be consumed by service companies and manufacturers than by end users.

This is what brings us back to DMS. For a company that is as passionate about data as Hitachi is, to be able to encourage more companies to get the most value from their data by sharing ideas, best practices or just a coffee or a few beers, is something to be proud of.

Thank you for your words… you have hit the center. There are many events, DMS only one, the formula works and we are a reference thanks to the contribution of professionals like you.