Rohit Choudhary is the Founder & CEO of the market leader in data observability, Acceldata.
Having data alone isn’t enough to deliver value to an enterprise – a report by HT Mint found that over 90% of the data available in the world today was generated over the last two to three years alone. But putting it all together is what drives results. For enterprises, data comes in all shapes and sizes—but in the era of hyper-information, disinformation can be equally destructive.
Rohit credits his success to his engineering roots, continuous innovation, a humbling sequence of entrepreneurial learning from successes and failures, and cultural alignment that kept his team together for nearly 20 years. Fresh off its $50 Million Series C funding round, Acceldata is leading the charge for the data observability industry, giving operational control back to understaffed data teams while maximizing ROI.
M.R. Rangaswami: What is Acceldata’s founding story and what led you to raise a significant $50 million Series C funding in the face of economic turmoil?
Rohit Choudhary: My co-founders and I started Acceldata in 2018 after recognizing that a better solution was needed to monitor, investigate, remediate, and manage the reliability of data pipelines and infrastructure. Having built complex data systems at several of the world’s largest companies, it was clear that enterprises were trying to build and manage data products using tools that weren’t optimized for this task. Despite significant investments, data teams still couldn’t see or understand what was happening inside mission-critical analytics and AI applications, failing to meet reliability, cost, and scale investments.
Since our launch, we have seen tremendous company momentum and were fortunate to secure a significant Series C funding round in the midst of an economic downturn. As a result, I can confidently say we’ve built the world’s most comprehensive and scalable data observability platform, correlating events across data, processing, and pipelines to transform how organizations develop and operate data products. Our funding speaks to the true value that organizations across the globe are achieving with data observability, and we’re excited to push the industry even further into the limelight.
M.R.: What is the importance of having reliable and established data across the enterprise? What consequences will companies experience without it?
Rohit: While an organization’s data is among its most valuable assets, data alone isn’t enough to deliver business value to an enterprise. Being able to piece it together to provide meaningful insights is what actually drives results and ROI.
With the migration of data and analytics to the cloud, data volume and data movement are more significant than ever. There is data-at-rest, data-in-motion, and data for consumption, each having different stops in the modern data stack that make it difficult for organizations to get a good handle on their data. Data reliability ensures that data is delivered on time with the utmost quality so business teams can make consistent, timely, and accurate decisions.
In the era of hyper-information, disinformation can be extremely destructive. However, the quality and integrity of the data in hand are what define the return on investment for various analytics and intelligence tools.
M.R.: What steps can organizations take to structure a logical plan of action to manage, monitor, and demystify data quality concerns and data outages?
Rohit: Data observability is the most logical plan of action to manage, monitor, and demystify data quality concerns, misinformation, and data downtimes. Software firms rely on observability as a solution to tackle data quality challenges and pipeline issues. Observability goes above and beyond just routine monitoring. It ensures teams are on top of breakdowns and manages data across four layers: Users, Compute, Pipeline, and Reliability.
Throughout the entire data process – from ingestion to consumption – data pipelines are moving data from disparate sources in an attempt to deliver actionable insights. When that data is accurate and timely, those insights help the enterprise gain a competitive advantage, and deliver the promise of an efficient data-driven enterprise.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com