Databricks More Complex Up Front but Significantly Cheaper than Snowflake

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ETR Insights presents an interview with the Senior VP of Global Infrastructure for a large financial services organization. This executive highlights a shift from the early post-COVID IT spending surge to a more moderated expenditure strategy, emphasizing workforce attrition, automation, and bulk software purchasing. The organization is intensively investing in AI and machine learning to … Read more

Who Acquired Who?

ETR Insights presents an interview with the Senior Director of Technology Integration at a small technology enterprise, who notes an uptick in auditing activities and a trend toward IT budget consolidation into comprehensive platforms. As remote working becomes the new norm, companies are restructuring their work and hiring strategies. Our guest discussed interest in generative … Read more

Optimization in the Face of Inflation 

ETR Insights presents an interview with a Director of IT for a large energy enterprise, who sheds light on the company’s tech spending strategies and priorities. The executive emphasizes a drive towards consolidating vendors and optimizing their tech investments to cut costs, with particular focus on cybersecurity. The company prefers comprehensive, “best-of-suite” vendors like Microsoft, … Read more

Power BI Taking Share from SAP and Qlik 

ETR Insights presents an interview with the VP of Information Technology & Services for a large agribusiness enterprise that complements its existing SAP ecosystem with tools from Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft. Our guest offers an evaluation of Analytics Cloud from SAP and explains why Power BI is taking share away. Learn why this company … Read more

Two Sides of the Same Coin

In this ETR Insights interview, the CIO and CISO of a small nonprofit medical research enterprise discussed how his organization is trying to leverage optimal value from their existing IT portfolio, while reducing spend where possible across SaaS workflows and cloud. He expects that current efforts to ramp up RPA and machine learning and artificial … Read more

Zscaler is “Top-Notch” but Struggles to Cater Across Verticals 

ETR Insights presents an interview with the Cyber Attack Response Engineer for a global financials enterprise. Readers will appreciate this informed perspective on platform-style security solutions, ZTNA, endpoint updates and sensor-based security technologies, and cost-efficient log management. The discussion turned quickly to security vendors, including Cloudflare, Tanium, CrowdStrike, Okta, Ping, SailPoint, and more within the … Read more

JUL23 Early Takeaways; Part II

Last week, ETR’s Research Team published Part I of the July 2023 Early Takeaways, leveraging preliminary data to examine sectors with improving and declining 2023 spending intent, as well as inflections captured at the vendor level. This week we wrap up with Part II of the series, looking deeper into year-over-year changes in Positive (Adopt … Read more

“Observability Bills Rack Up Quickly”

ETR Insights recently caught up with the Vice President of Information Technology at a large tech enterprise. Our guest shared thoughts on eliminating redundancy, streamlining data warehousing and analytics, and how companies should invest to best administer a hybrid remote environment. Additionally, we discuss the unsustainable nature of ingestion-based pricing and where Splunk, Datadog, and … Read more

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