The beginning of the new year is a great opportunity to summarize the previous year, and to look back at the projects, challenges, achievements, and all the exciting work we did in Madeira Data Solutions this year.
18 days into 2016 and before we all dive into the ongoing of 2016, we wanted to stop for a moment and share our excitement with you. It’s hard to summarize everything we did this year, so we picked the events and moments that we are most excited about.
Data – Big Data
Every year, data becomes more central and crucial to the business, and in many cases, data is what distinguishes the organization from its competitors. Throughout 2015, we were invited to participate in big data projects in leading companies. We were involves in all phases of the projects, starting with the analysis, design and the choice of big data platforms, through the implementation, the migration process, maintenance and support, and down to the data analytics and visualization.
Those of you who know us and follow us, you know that we enjoy sharing our experience. We regularly publish professional blog posts, useful scripts, tips and best practices, and other relevant content, in order to share with the community, but without overloading. Just like we enjoy newsletters with useful and focused content, we like to provide the same experience to our readers. We constantly try to improve our newsletter to include just the right amount of relevant content. If you are not subscribed to our newsletter yet, then you can join now.
The Kind of Events We Like
2015 was full of professional conferences, unforgettable events and interesting presentations. Here is a short list of some of the events we participated in this year…
PASS Summit
This is the largest conference in the world covering the Microsoft Data Platform. This conference covers technologies such as SQL Server, Power BI, Azure Machine Learning, and much more. Once a year, around 6,000 DBAs, BI professionals and other data oriented people attend this conference, in order to connect, share and learn. The list of speakers in this conference includes the leading experts in the world, and we were very proud to send our own speakers to the conference this year.
Guy Glantser, our founder and CEO, and also Matan Yungman, our CTO, were chosen to speak in the event this year. Both Guy and Matan are Microsoft Data Platform MVPs, with many years of experience in design, implementation, consulting and training. Matan and Guy also host the SQL Server Radio show together, where they share their experience and ideas about SQL Server.
Here is a nice tweet that was published right after Guy’s presentation.
And here is Matan’s recap of the conference.
Expert Days
This is one of the largest and most successful technological events in Israel aimed mainly at developers. It includes 5 training days with full-day seminars in various technological topics. It is organized by E4D once a year, and we have the pleasure of running the data track in this event every year. This time, Guy Glantser delivered a seminar about Hadoop Fundamentals.
You can download the presentations from the seminar here.
The Power of Data in the Cloud
This is another very interesting and successful event, which we organized together with Microsoft. It was a free training day covering the Microsoft data stack in the cloud, including things like Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Machine Learning, Azure HDInsight, and more.
Click here to read more about this event.
We are already working on our next free training day, which is going to carry the name Big Data Made Simple. More details coming soon…
The Next Generation Program
This year we decided to open another round of our unique Next Generation program. This is really a unique and amazing program. The goal of this program is to grow the next generation of big data professionals. We look for real stars to join this program.
The program includes a very comprehensive training phase, including a lot of exercises and practice. Each star is assigned a personal mentor who is there for him, from the very first steps. The Next Generation stars join our team from day one, and throughout the training phase they already participate in big data projects.
We are looking for 5 stars. They don’t need to have a relevant professional background. This is not a requirement, because we will teach them everything they need to know. We are looking for people with high values, analytical thinking, excellent communication skills, and high motivation to become data experts. We are happy to announce that we have already found 3 stars, really brilliant people, and they have already begun their first steps in the world of Big Data. It also means that we are still looking for 2 additional stars to join us, so if you know such people, please send them to us.
Click here to learn more about the program.
Life Balance
We are proud to say that this year we also made some meaningful achievements that are not necessarily related to our professional core business, but rather they are very much related to our personal lives.
If you know us, then you already know we are inspired by our core values and our organizational culture. One of our great challenges, especially as a professional services company, is to allow our team the ability to balance their lives between work and other things, not only when they work in our office, but also when they work with our customers.
Guy Glantser, our CEO, and Dikla Aviv, our HR manager, were invited to present our journey to life balance in the annual HR conference, together with Mali Alkobi, the guru of life balance in Israel. Here are some pictures from the event.
Coming Up in 2016
We are excited to start the new year with so many great opportunities and challenges:
Consulting and working with our customers on various data platforms and data challenges
Lots of data professional training
Learning and sharing with the community
Developing of new data related products and services
Running professional events
Participating in leading conferences and events around the world
Wishing us all an awesome successful year! Enjoy