Interview with CMO, SQream – David Leichner

“Having a strong leadership team has been the key to motivating employees and successfully facing changes head-on.”

1. Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here?
I’ve been in the data management and enterprise software world for the last 26 years. I have known SQream since its inception. Around two years ago the CEO Ami Gal is also a longtime friend called me to tell me that he was working on an investment to include Alibaba and that he’d like me to join his team. I took a fresh look at the company and knew right away that the company was making great strides with the product, SQream DB, with some incredible technology on its hands and decided to join as CMO.

2. Given the massive proliferation of Information and software technology, how do you see the IT market evolving over the next few years? 
Data is growing to massive new proportions that the world – and IT – has never experienced or had to deal with. Organizations are finding that legacy data management solutions, designed for much smaller volumes of data, are already struggling under the new load. Scalability will become the name of the game, with the focus of the IT market on developing new technologies that can keep up with exponentially growing data in the long run. Coupled with this is the move to the cloud and processing at the Edge which will become the norm over the next few years.

3. What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
IoT. The growing number of sensors and improved connectivity (from ZigBee to 5G) opened up exciting opportunities to extract real business value from the collected data. By analyzing collected data or feeding parameters into models, simple changes can reduce waste, predict maintenance issues, alert staff to potential problems, and even completely automate processes. Using IoT in industry has a real effect on economic bottom lines, production yields, sustainable production for the environment and people’s life in many aspects.

4. How do you think big data analytics has contributed in the faster and efficient growth of organizations?
Big data has become the key to taking better decisions and solving business problems in most industries. From improving customer experience, to optimizing marketing strategies, to data-driven partnerships and risk reduction – big data is driving everyone from small companies to large enterprises to increase their client base and grow business.

5. How do you differentiate Sqream DB from other business intelligence DB solutions?
Compared to traditional data warehouses, SQream DB enables significantly faster analytics, with a fraction of the infrastructure requirements and costs. Compared to in-memory databases, SQream DB is not limited by RAM, and is therefore able to handle petabytes of data, compared to terabytes handled by in-memory databases. SQream enables organizations to uncover previously unobtainable insights by enabling them to scale their analytics to previously unviable limits.

6. What’s the biggest challenge that you in your organizational role need to tackle to make any strategic decisions work?
As a company whose product is designed to support an ever-evolving market, it’s sometimes necessary to pivot. Getting everyone on board with a change in direction can be a challenge. For us at SQream,

having a strong leadership team has been the key to motivating employees and successfully facing changes head-on.

7. What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Keeping meetings to a minimum and ensuring that every meeting that takes place on a regular basis is really needed. Our teams sit in open space which encourages ongoing cooperation and collaboration without the need for long tedious meetings.

8. How do you prepare for a cognitive world as a leader?
To prepare for the new age of AI, businesses need to make sure they have access to the wealth of data that they have been collecting for decades. This means creating a unified data ecosystem, simplifying data pipelines, and correlating data that is distributed across the organization. With AI-ready infrastructure in place, companies then need to shift from a historical perspective to a mindset of using data to predict and anticipate trends.

9. What is the core software technology capability of your firm that you bring to people? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer life cycle?
SQream DB is a data warehouse solution that significantly reduces ingest and query times, enabling organizations to analyze significantly more data, and attain previously unobtainable business intelligence. By analyzing raw data directly, SQream enables data scientists and BI analysts to ask more questions about more data from a variety of perspectives without the need for arduous preparation.

10. Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?
When we started developing SQream DB, one of the original ideas was to enable streaming IoT data to be analyzed quickly at the Edge and in a very small footprint by using hardware acceleration – namely a GPU. We will be coming out with a new version of our GPU-accelerated data warehouse specifically supporting IoT in the near future.

11. What is your take on the massive explosion of IT across so many categories? Do you see competition, opportunities to partner and/or integrate?
The data explosion has created opportunities for companies to get to know their customers on a never-before-seen level. Competition is now focused not only on the product, but on their ability to target and customize their offerings to enable customers to leverage IT to the maximum.