“Data is the new sand!” So proclaimed Boomi CEO Steve Lucas at Boomi World last year. Apart from cracking me up, he made an indelible impression about the criticality of focusing on the use of data, not just its existence. Data only brings value when it’s put to work!

Over the past few decades, enterprises largely wielded the power of data in two ways: inside operational systems like Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, et al; and alternately, through analytics via a Data Warehouse.

The concept of Enterprise Data Warehousing grew out of a desire to analyze data, and a realization that operational systems were not designed to facilitate such queries. They were designed to transact business, manage operations, get things done. Analytics was different.

A whole industry grew out of this concept! Companies like Teradata dominated early, but a whole range of competing solutions arrived as well: Netezza, ParAccel, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Kickfire; then RedShift, Snowflake, Dataricks, Firebolt… You get the idea!

The “data-driven” business was born! And the Data Warehouse became the beating heart of analytics for these forward-looking companies. But most of the analysis was done offline, with the benefits then applied manually by Analysts, Data Scientists and their colleagues.

As far back as 2001, when I entered this industry full-time, we talked about “BI for the Masses,” a promise to “democratize” the power of data analytics. Tools like Tableau helped spread the magic, and Spotfire and Qlik and scores of other front-end tools to visualize data.

Meanwhile, a vast trove of vendors focused on getting data into the warehouse, mostly via the tried-and-true power of Extract-Transform-Load, or ETL. When the Cloud arrived as a target, we saw ELT. There were data virtualization vendors as well, and Change Data Capture (CDC).

Still, even up until a few years ago, there tended to be a core group of people who directly benefitted from the warehouse. The industry wondered: What can we do to really propagate this tremendous resource? That’s when something called Reverse ETL arrived.

Although the moniker is a bit bulky, the idea is fairly simple: Funneling clean, certified data back into those operational systems whence it came! This practice brought immediate, tangible value to all the frontline workers in ERP, CRM, SCM and other disciplines. Hooray!

One vendor that helped pioneer this new wrinkle in the data world was Rivery, recently acquired by Boomi! Rivery nails the Modern Data Pipeline for their clients, and enables the very kind of Reverse ETL that’s now taking the world by storm!

Want to learn more about what they’re doing as part of this growing ecosystem? Then get your bags packed and ready for Boomi World 2025, in Dallas, TX! Come meet yours truly and let’s talk data! Learn more right here: https://bit.ly/3G3rVNc