Dremio’s Subsurface LIVE 2024 Recap
I attended Dremio’s Subsurface LIVE conference in-person, in NYC.
If you don’t like reading, you can check out the video recap here.
The day kicked off with a “Breakfast with the Dremio Product Team,” where attendees engaged with James Rowland-Jones (VP of Product Management), Isha Sharma (Senior Director of Product), and Casey Karst (Principal Product Manager). It was an insightful start to the day, setting the stage for what was to come.
The keynote session, delivered by Dremio’s CEO, Sendur Sellakumar, was a highlight. He addressed the challenges organizations face with AI adoption, including slow data access, maintenance issues, and incomplete insights. Sendur underscored the benefits of an open lakehouse, emphasizing customer freedom and cost savings. He defined “open” as not just about open source but also about providing flexibility and freedom to customers. Dremio’s commitment to avoiding vendor lock-in was evident.
As a top five contributor to Iceberg, Dremio is co-hosting the Iceberg Summit with Tabular later this month. The company has also introduced auto-scaling for their cloud, making it more affordable.
Dremio’s mission to minimize query failures is impressive, with their current failure rate already as low as 0.5%. The announcement that Dremio Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure was well received.
The presentation by Colleen Tartow, Field CTO of VAST Data, focused on the Zero Trust Data Lakehouse. Her advice to “never trust and always verify everything,” from data sources to people, processes, and access, was thought-provoking.
Later, Benjamin Schweizer from STACKIT discussed the Open Digital Ecosystem, which focuses on creating infrastructure and platform services for stability. He also announced the launch of the STACKIT Data and AI platform, which connects business applications with BI tools and offers no-code/low-code solutions.
Karl Smolka from TD Securities provided valuable insights based on his experiences. He highlighted the challenges of data literacy, the difficulty of quantifying value, the importance of executive buy-in, and the evolving technology landscape.
In between sessions, I spoke with several sponsors to understand how they partner with Dremio. Domo’s custom-built integration allows for smooth querying of existing data or ingestion of new data into Dremio’s Data Lakehouse. Upsolver is the ingestion engine for high-scale data into the Iceberg Lakehouse, which Dremio can query. Datafold offers a data quality platform for validating data when replicating into Dremio’s data lake or making changes to SQL code.
I also spoke with Rishi Bhatnagar from QuaerisAI, who highlighted how Quaeris and Dremio are a perfect match. Dremio manages complex data, while Quaeris makes the data more accessible for end users.
I had a great time networking and learning at Subsurface LIVE and hope to be back next year. Also — Gnarly rocks ;)
