So learned a lot about Google Cloud and cloud in general. And then prior to that, had a stint with Dell for almost around eight years in Austin. My last engagement there, or my last assignment there, was to build data warehouse appliances in partnership with Microsoft. So there was another exciting stint at Dell and then prior to that, if you all remember AOL, I was there for about five years, started as an intern, and then working in the data warehouse group for AOL. So yeah, focus always has been data analytics, and for last 10, 12 years, I would say broaden that horizon with cloud and big data as well. So yeah, that’s my short little background.

Dustin Raney:

Awesome. So Ankur, let’s start with a question from your LinkedIn profile. So it says that you like to propel disruption. We love the provocative on our show here. Why is that or what is that and what does it benefit bringing that kind of disruption, propelling disruption?

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, by that basically what I mean is big data was a disruptive technology back then I would say around 10, 12 years. Cloud I would say still is a little bit of disruptor, although I would say it’s more of a standard now. But essentially I see myself as a change agent bringing in these disruptive technologies and working alongside with organizations to see how we can benefit from those innovative technologies. So that propelled disruption is essentially from that aspect, standing up teams, upskilling teams, getting them ready to embrace that innovation and then build solutions and help our clients to modernize their ecosystem. So that’s basically in short, my mission is.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, that’s awesome. And the reality is what a great industry to be in because it seems like there’s something to disrupt every single day. So much has been going on and so we’ve talked already about cloud several times and cloud has a broad definition set. So help us understand a little more when we’re talking about cloud differentiation between hyperscalers like AWS or GCP and marketing clouds or some of the other platforms sitting on top of those hyperscalers like Databricks or Snowflake kind of differentiate what’s going on there.

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, no, I mean there are definitely a lot of concepts when you talk about cloud. I would say infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. So if you look at CDP platforms or if you look at marketing clouds, these are mostly pre-built software suites, which are available on public cloud platforms. So that’s the top layer I would say software as a service. Email is a perfect example. We just go there and use the service. We don’t have to worry about how the email will be sent or what’s the infrastructure behind it. Platform as a service underneath, I would say is really where professionals like you and me probably work in leveraging technologies like you mentioned, Snowflake or Databricks. These are essentially your platform as a service which provide the whole ecosystem for you to do or to design or to develop a certain workload.

So for example, a lot of our work is on the data side, bringing in marketing data from disparate sources. How do you organize that data? And that’s really where you need platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift. There are many, many disruptive technologies out there. They sit on that hyperscale infrastructure, which is infrastructure as a service. Like you provision virtual machines, you do the networking, you bolt on the security, then you do your encryption, things like those. So that’s basically the underneath layer, which is where AWS, Google, Microsoft, they’re all playing. And on top of which you bolt on these cloud-native platforms like Snowflake, Databricks to help organize your data, to derive the insights, things like those. So that’s I would say in short, in summary, at a very, very high level, a three-layer architecture.

Dustin Raney:

Awesome. So Ankur, when you were talking about propelling disruption earlier, you mentioned people bringing in the right people with the right skill sets because things are constantly changing. And with the cloud, you just have to think that the type of employees, the type of developers, or whether you have marketers getting hands-on rather than these deep-level engineers, you have more people wanting or expecting applications rather than having to get in and understand deep level code C+ or whatever. What do you see, where do you see the industry going from that perspective with these kind of apps being built inside of these cloud ecosystems? I mean, do you see a shift going from deep technical need to a more, hey, now you can hire people out of college and the apps are there, you can just start doing your marketing? Where do you see that from a resource perspective?

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, no, I think through AI. I would bring in the AI definitely into the mix here that AI is definitely making it a lot easier now. Operations or functions, which were manual otherwise up until now are now being streamlined, are now being made more efficient using AI. But I think at the end of the day, you still need humans to build the AI. So you still need software engineers, you still need people with programming skills. Maybe their day-to-day functions are changing a little bit. They may not be working on building the applications that we consume. Maybe they are more needed in building the next-gen disruption but from day to day, I think the talent that we have, other resources that we have, they are still very much needed to build these data applications.

If someone knows SQL, they definitely are very much in demand because data analytics, it’s such a hot field, someone knows cloud. We need those engineers to build much more cloud-native and much more efficient applications on cloud through infrastructure as a code through agile methodologies, through CI/CD pipelines. So all these skills, I would say are still very much in demand. The landscape is shifting. Who knows what future may look like 10 years, 15 years from now? But software engineers, data engineers, machine learning engineers, ML engineers, they’re all still very much in demand. So it’s a hot field these days. Yes, absolutely. For sure.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s great. And dovetailing that into a broader question around current trends and challenges. Obviously, AI is everywhere from sense of talk track, right? Lots of people talking about it. We’ve talked about that three-tiered architecture that is becoming more and more prevalent through the infrastructure and the software and the platform capabilities. So what are you seeing specifically for clients in the marketing and advertising ecosystem? What are the key trends around those topics as well as what are some of the challenges? I know there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of optimism around things, especially around AI, but what are some challenges that go with that as well?

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, no, I mean it’s a very, very broad question. I would say there are aspects that I can talk a little bit about from the business side at a macro level, like what’s happening in the industry. And then there are aspects from a technology perspective, which I think are in front of architects and engineers on a day-to-day basis as well. But if you look at the macro level, especially post-pandemic, I would say the cloud adoption saw an exponential surge in adoption. So everybody realized during those pandemic days that cloud is the way to go. They can’t physically send people in the office or in the data center to manage the hardware and infrastructure. So definitely cloud adoption saw exponential rise and organizations who are going with their preferred providers such as Google or AWS or Microsoft or even going multi-cloud to hedge the risks.

So definitely cloud adoption is very high at a very macro level and this cloud adoption is embraced, I would say, both by business as well as IT. IT definitely to modernize the whole ecosystem in terms of platforms, technologies, their data platforms, networking, security, everything. And then they soon realized not only can they take their data centers to cloud, but all these big large massive data platforms such as data warehouses, databases, they are prime candidates for modernization as well. So cloud providers, like we talked about Snowflake, we talked about Databricks, these are platforms which are providing the cutting edge technology, which are all cloud native. So soon we saw a surge in data modernization as well, trying to reimagine how the data ecosystem should be laid out. New roles like chief data officers, chief analytic officers started to come into play. So at a macro level, these are definitely a lot of trends that we saw coming in recent years.

And marketing is also evolving. It’s not left behind. We saw the surge of CDP, customer data platforms it’s still going on, and they bring a ton of value. They provide a fully-baked ecosystem to centralize, to organize all your customer data in one central place and orchestrate it in different channels. So that’s also I would say a byproduct of cloud because cloud underneath is the platform on which all those capabilities are built on. So that’s at the macro level we’re seeing, if I may call disruption or I may call evolution or I may call advancement, these are all happening at the business level as well as on the IT level in terms of organization. Now from a technology standpoint, we just talked about AI. That definitely is, I would say, a big disruptor these days because you can take that AI and use in many different functions, be it generating creatives on the fly or be it generating code or creating your test plans, which are basically day-to-day functions for our technical folks.

But then modern ways of sharing data, like how you can actually have a seamless transfer of data without any manual intervention, like gone are those days where you take a file out from a database, extract it, ship it through SFTP, and then load it back into another database. So now you can have a zero-copy data-sharing capability across many different platforms. That’s one example. Composable architectures is something that we are also seeing that instead of making those redundant copies of data between a data warehouse and a CDP platform, CDPs are now intelligent enough to bring that compute closer to the data. So many different… To answer your question, many, many different trends that we are seeing in this space. I’m sorry, I’m getting a little technical here, but-

Kyle Hollaway:

No, that’s great. No, I appreciate it.

Ankur Jain:

… it’s a tough question. It’s a very broad spectrum of trends which are happening.

Dustin Raney:

And I guess down that vein of data modernization, the advancements in honestly consumer privacy, and you touched on it with the ability for brands to store data and not have to move it is a big component of that. I think one of the use cases, I mean I know a lot of our listeners are always curious about is around activation, syndication, like the publisher ecosystem. A lot of times they have all this data and they want to do something with it. They still want to reach new customers, they want to grow their existing customer base. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s starting to take form inside of this cloud infrastructure? How we modern… How’s the infrastructure starting to hold up the greater ad tech ecosystem?

Ankur Jain:

Yes, yes, absolutely. No, it’s a very relevant topic these days, Dustin, what you brought up. And I would say a concept called clean room definitely is picking up like a hot cake these days, especially in this industry. And I would say another example of disruption, like a very disruptive concept of how you bring in data and share with not only internal parties but also with external parties. These external parties could be agencies, these external parties could be your co-marketing partners. These external parties could be publishing network, ed tech platforms. But the key is how do you share this data in a privacy-safe manner? And that’s really where I think these clean rooms come in because instead of physically shipping data to one platform or to another platform from one to another, these clean rooms act as an intermediate platform sitting in without physically copying data.

And then you bring in products like REAL ID to use that as a currency to anonymize the data and then share it with those external parties in a privacy-safe manner. So we’re seeing a lot of disruption in that space and definitely excited to be part of that journey alongside with Kyle. But yeah, no, that’s another prime example of how you make sure that privacy is not compromised. You make sure that privacy is in place and yet be able to open new opportunities for brands to share and activate that data.

Kyle Hollaway:

So like you’ve mentioned, there’s been a lot of disruption, evolution over even the past five years as a lot of these technologies matured and taken on a mainstream footprint. In your assessment, because you work a lot with clients and at an industry level, where do you think we are on a maturity scale in general? Most companies, how far do you think they are down this path? Do you think there’s laggards that are too far behind, or is everyone in equal footing of where we are in the journey?

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, no, I would say again, nobody’s a laggard. I think it’s never too late to adopt cloud. Even if you are on cloud, I would say once you start taking a look, given the pace of advancement that is happening in this industry, it’s very important to keep up because all these new different technologies that we just talked about, they are being rolled out almost on a daily basis. New innovation is happening. So I’ll give you an example. So even if let’s say someone is already on cloud, it could be lift and shift, meaning you take your application as it was designed on-prem in your own data center, and then you just replicate that in cloud, right? That’s what is called as lift and shift. But organizations who did that and claimed that, yes, we are on cloud soon realized it’s not the best way, it’s not the most cost-effective way, it’s not the most optimized way, which led to them going back to the whiteboard and thinking, okay, how should we redesign this to reap the most benefits out of cloud?

And that’s really where this concept of refactoring comes in. So what I am seeing in the industry these days is that optimization. How do we optimize the cloud to its fullest benefit by embracing the serverless cloud-native architectures? So whatever application that we lifted to cloud, how do we redesign it, how do we refactor it to reap the most benefits? So that’s one initiative that I’m seeing in the industry and organizations who have been successful are seeing the benefits in terms of cost, in terms of performance, in terms of all these concepts that we just talked about like sharing data in a very cost-efficient manner, things like those are definitely happening.

Plus I think AI is another big force attracting customers to migrate their workloads to cloud because all these large language models, you need very heavy compute. You need a lot of these pipelines, which should be cloud-native. All these LLMs are running on cloud, so you need to bring your data closer to where these AI capabilities are. So that’s another attractor, I would say, for organizations to bring their workloads to cloud. So it’s never too late. Even if you are on cloud, take a second look to see are you doing the right thing. So those are some of the discussions that I’m engaged with our clients as well.

Kyle Hollaway:

Well, I love that because I’ve had two recent just situations that came up that really brought some of this to the forefront. One is certainly on the small to medium business side. I was actually at just a hardware provider, literally like pipe and tube provider because I was doing a project at the house and I was slightly shocked to see that they’re basically using what appeared to be probably an AS/400 system with a green screen to operate their back office yet highly efficient because it’s been there forever. And I was just thinking like, wow, okay, here’s a small business enterprise that is highly optimized where they are. And I’m sure there’d be benefits of a move to a cloud infrastructure and a modernization, but there’s an economic factor associated with that of the effort to make that move from a human capital standpoint, retraining legacy employees as well as building out the right kind of application to do that. So that was one interesting thing. Another piece was I was talking to more of a midsize industry player.

They still have a mainframe functioning and just a consideration that we can get caught up on the forefront of these things because we are challenging ourselves, especially a company like Acxiom. We’re constantly pushing the boundaries and ensuring that we’re at the forefront of some of these major shifts in the industry, but much of the world is still operating in a more legacy model. And so to your point about it’s never too late, and that’s because it’s like the reality is most… Not most, there’s probably a large number of businesses, they’re still making that determination of when and how to even move to the cloud, especially if they’ve been in business for a while.

Ankur Jain:

Yeah, no, absolutely. On the flip side, I’ll give you an example, Kyle. I mean, just on Wednesday night I was traveling back home after meeting a client and I was at the airport. I had a little bit time to catch up, maybe have a meal before I board the flight. And it’s amazing to see when you sit at these restaurants at the airport and every table has this QR code, and that QR code is so intelligent that it knows where exactly you are, which table is it, and what meal did you order, what beverage did you order alongside? You can keep the tab open, you can place the order, you can keep adding stuff to that tab, and then once you check out, the receipt just shows up magically on your phone. So I think there are examples on both sides, right?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, that’s good.

Ankur Jain:

But it is amazing how… But let me just complete that example one more time because the scale at which they have floated that business model is just amazing because now you can see that same model being replicated every single airport, every single restaurant within the airport embracing that. So what these technologies provide, if you embrace that, is the scale that you can bring to your business as well. So yes, and absolutely, I think SMB is right to your point. I think SMB is right. That’s where I think we will see not only the enterprises, but SMB also leaping to cloud. And those who will make that leap, I think will be the businesses of future because the pace at which this technology is getting disrupted, the business models also are getting disrupted as well. So I would highly encourage those who have not taken a look at cloud, take a second look and see what it can do for your business, not only from a technology perspective but also from a business model perspective.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, that’s great, Ankur. And people talk about cloud in two general categories. So people say public cloud and private cloud. So one, would you mind breaking down for our listeners what those two things mean? And then maybe on top of that, maybe offer up your opinion on why should someone consider one or the other.

Ankur Jain:

Yes, yes. No, that’s a very good question. Public cloud is essentially where you don’t own any infrastructure, it’s all leased. If you spin up a virtual machine, it’s owned by one of those hyperscalers that we talked about. But essentially you are just leasing it on a temporary basis to basically run your workloads. So everything is available through internet and, in very simplest terms, that’s basically what public cloud is. It’s open to public, it’s a multi-tenant architecture, and you basically are just leasing those resources to get the job done. Whether it’s storage, whether it’s a virtual machine, whether it’s networking, whatever. Private cloud, as the name suggests, it’s private, right? It’s not open to public. You are the only tenant in that environment, and then it can be hosted by you or it can be hosted by a third party. But essentially you draw the four walls around it and say that, “Look, it’s dedicated to one particular tenant,” which could be Acxiom, which could be any other organization.

So that’s basically what private cloud is. And there are successful businesses who are running on a private cloud. And I think I will introduce a new term called hybrid. Hybrid is an architecture is a concept which is here to stay because what hybrid means is you have some workloads which are running on public cloud, and you have some workloads which may be running on-prem or your private cloud because of maybe data gravity because of maybe sensitivity, maybe because of compliance from a regulatory standpoint. So there are many aspects why organizations may still be on private cloud or may still be on their on-prem, but using the benefits of cloud wherever they can.

So that hybrid architecture is mostly what I see even for our applications or our solutions that we bring to market. Clients still have some footprint on-prem through which they send us the data and then we take it to cloud and then derive the insights for them and make it actionable. But yeah, no, to answer your question, you have private cloud, think of it mostly on-prem and then public cloud, which is all available publicly. And then how do you bring the two together to create the application? That’s the hybrid side.

Dustin Raney:

Awesome. And I guess when you start talking about the use cases, and you touched on it a little bit, the sensitivity of the data, what you’re doing with it, either from an analytic perspective, if there’s PII involved, whether you have things that you can really know about someone and get down to Dustin Raney versus maybe a pseudonymized version that there needs to be more of a shared ecosystem. So would you say public cloud is where the marketing ecosystem’s going in general, while private cloud is where you’re bringing things together, holding that secure data, and doing the more data management activities?

Ankur Jain:

Yes. Yes, I would say so. I mean, I think especially, just for an example’s sake, if you talk about financial services industry, definitely there are regulatory compliances that one may have to think in terms of either PCI compliances or it could be FINRA, it could be many other aspects that one can think of. And from that reason, you may have to secure that data and whether you can still do it on public cloud. But most of the organizations that I have seen so far prefer private cloud or on-prem. But then with technologies like clean rooms with technologies like identity resolution, you can anonymize that data, you can desensitize that data, and then take it to cloud for bigger, larger processing.

So that’s really where your marketing clouds like Adobes and Salesforce, which are native to cloud, and you need that capability for activation purposes. You need that capability for advanced analytical purposes. You need that for AI purposes. So all those capabilities are existing on cloud. So you just have to be smart enough, I would say, to figure out in what shape or form we can take that data to cloud and reap the benefits of the technologies which are available. So it’s again like a hybrid architecture that you work with. Yes.

Kyle Hollaway:

Well, hey, great conversation. Really appreciate all of this and we’re starting to approach the end of our time here. So let’s go into a little bit of a lightning round, just some faster fire of questions here and just get your take on things, so multi-cloud or cloud portability, compatibility. Where do you see brands in terms of relying on either a single cloud provider or multi-cloud?

Ankur Jain:

I think multi-cloud is the future, especially for big, large mature organizations who are playing in multiple geographies, who are processing massive amounts of data, where SLAs are of utmost importance in terms of delivering the experience to their end customers, where security is definitely of utmost importance as well. You will see some complex architectures in terms of multi-cloud evolving. So yeah, definitely I think the containerization, we didn’t talk about containers. These are how you build your applications and move them from one cloud to another. So organizations are already doing it. So yes, absolutely. I think multi-cloud is one area where we will see a lot of advancement happening in near future.

Kyle Hollaway:

And then you touched on CDPs.

Ankur Jain:

Yes.

Kyle Hollaway:

So real quick, your view of the role of CDPs today and going into the future?

Ankur Jain:

I think that we will see a lot of evolution on CDPs as well. I mean, CDPs started as a replacement of marketing database, speaking of marketing, but I think soon organizations realize that some of these CDPs are purpose-built like not all use cases can be solved by one particular CDP platform. Although CDPs have come a long way, and I think they will continue to evolve as cloud technologies evolve, as your data strategies evolve, as your AI capabilities evolve, as marketing use cases will evolve, I think CDPs will continue to evolve as well. So yes, definitely there’s a lot of evolution in that space as well.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, so there’s disruption on many fronts. US Treasury Department concerns?

Ankur Jain:

Treasury Department concerns. I think, again, going back to financial services, although I’m not a privacy expert, but I would say I was just quickly glancing through it when they announced it. I think the number one thing is the taxonomy. If you look at the first bullet that they rolled out is the taxonomy. Just in these 30, 40 minutes of conversation, we rolled out so many different terms, [inaudible 00:33:51] this and that. So it gets very confusing in this space because there’s so much jargon. So how do you even align on certain concepts so that everybody talks about the same aspect in the same unified way? So that’s one. Transparency, privacy, ethics, these are all very important topics, especially in the financial services industry. So I think it’s very relevant and I think it’s first step of many more to come, especially in this space. So I mean, that would be my takeaway, which I think is all positive. Yes.

Dustin Raney:

Awesome. And then one last question, and we touched on this as well, but just I think it’s super important on modern data sharing. What do you leave our listeners with as far as why you would put your data in the public cloud? Is that the main reason?

Ankur Jain:

The value propositions are many like we just touched upon cloud, we touched upon performance, we touched upon scalability, we touched upon inbuilt, high resiliency, high availability, disaster recovery. These are all concepts which are inbuilt. If you’re looking for a PCI-compliant cloud environment, if you’re looking for a federal regulation, compliant cloud platforms. So all these advancements are happening on cloud. So the benefits are many, I would say. So it’s not just one, it’s a multifaceted environment, which brings in many different benefits. So definitely there are a lot of value propositions why one should think in terms of cloud.

Kyle Hollaway:

All right, well we also like to end just with a standard wrap-up question. So going back to AI, if we fed all the data about Ankur into AI, what are the three words that would produce to describe you? And I promise I won’t actually do this offline to validate your answer here, but…

Ankur Jain:

I don’t know, maybe technologist, boring.

Kyle Hollaway:

You’ve not been boring. It’s been great. Great conversation.

Ankur Jain:

My family says that all I talk about is technology.

Kyle Hollaway:

There you go.

Ankur Jain:

I don’t know, I can’t think of third maybe foodie. I like trying out some new restaurants. Austin is bubbling up and Michelin just recently announced their ratings in Texas. So there were quite a few restaurants who earn that recognition. So me and my wife, we were just thinking, okay, maybe we should just try them out.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, there you go. A little Michelin tour of Austin.

Ankur Jain:

Yes. Yes.

Dustin Raney:

We might have to make a little detour and go down to Austin now. I’m also a foodie.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, might have to have a follow-up podcast with you reviewing the Austin food scene.

Ankur Jain:

There you go. That would be awesome.

Kyle Hollaway:

That sounds great.

Dustin Raney:

And we’ll see if they’re modern in using cloud technology behind this. That’s what drove them there.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. If we get to order with a QR code.

Ankur Jain:

Very good.

Dustin Raney:

Exactly. Well, Ankur, hey, thank you so much for taking the time.

Ankur Jain:

It’s been a pleasure.

Dustin Raney:

I know Kyle and I both got a lot out of this, and I know our listeners will too we’d certainly want to have you back at some point in the near future because I know things move quickly in this area and people are always wanting to know where things are going.

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