Who is Alexander?
I’m a decent tech guy who is always curious about new technology, research, and, more recently, the art of making great coffee. Yep, I’m a certified barista, too. In my free time, I contribute to some open source projects, not regularly but from time to time. I’m also invested in some startups in the IoT, retail, and crypto spaces.
Tell us more about your role in databloom.ai
I’m currently co-founder and CEO for Databloom, the Data Mesh company, and operate at the crossroads of data-driven enterprises, AI, and computer science to deliver solutions that solve the toughest data problems. Databloom was founded by Jorge, a professor and world-known researcher in the topic of big data processing, and me in 2019 and has been bootstrapped since.
What is the most difficult part of your job? But the most rewarding one?
What is difficult? From my perspective, a solution is either within reach or will be within reach at some point. Starting a business and bootstrapping is a difficult job, but also the most rewarding one. Helping others is sometimes difficult, but it is also rewarding – and sometimes it is not. I like to have challenges and solve them pragmatically.
Is there anything that you would change about your professional path?
Absolutely nothing! Everything brought me to that exact point in time, and I wouldn’t change a bit.
What’s your key strategy for the development of your company?
Customer focussed. Federated Learning is our effort to provide an easy-to-use solution for a real complex data problem. Our main focus lies on the user interface; we want to abstract the complexity and invite much more people to use machine learning and AI techniques in their daily working lives.
What do you think about the next period of time, keeping in mind the pandemic and the new business climate? How will your industry be affected?
We see a bright future, but when the business climate deteriorates, so do IT budgets. We provide the ability to reduce data processing budgets while enabling massive performance gains with our Data Mesh solution. That leads to my positive outlook, as even the pandemic has shown. Data management projects across nations and continents are necessary to develop data-driven solutions without compromising data sovereignty. And that is exactly what we deliver: compliant data processing across data warehouses and data lakes, in an industry with a predicted compound annual growth rate of over 35%! That’s a huge roster with plenty of room for new and improved players.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
We build the most parts or contribute to the open-source project, here at Apache Wayang (incubating), in house. But mostly all data technologies have a more or less significant impact on our business model, starting with data warehouses, big data, data lakes, and data streaming over data storage engines up to quantum computing. With our solution, the user can combine everything into one single point of access, even not-yet-developed technologies.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
A kindle 🙂 I mostly read hard science fiction, but I also read books about arthouse and art, particularly about contemporary artists who fascinate me.
