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Big Community together with ADAX held an event on Big Data called “Do You Want To Wrangle”. It was held at the ADAX office in Bangsar South that packed the seating capacity at the venue. Simran Kaur, Director – Partner and Client Engagement, ADAX and from Talend, Amine Slimane, Senior Pre-sale consultant at Talend, were on hand to share their expertise and knowledge to the students and working community present.

Simran, who has spent the last 13 years in various large MNC’s both in Malaysia and regionally working with key enterprise clients to understand their requirements and scope business centric deliverables, shared that not only is the Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21^st century, but the Data Science Professional as a whole, fall into that category.

(L-R) Ms Farah, Ms Ainil, Ms Alia and Mr Ooi from Talent Corp

She added that Big Data is the new Crude Oil because raw data is not worth much without first being cleaned. “That’s where data wranglers come in. Their expertise is a very important piece of the puzzle when putting together a Big Data Ecosystem within an organization,” she said.

A study done by IDC and the Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), showed that by year 2020, Malaysia will need approximately 20,000 data professionals to keep up with the demand.

“So to meet with this demand, ADAX is also running an enablement and development initiative for talent which was initiated by MDEC. Our goal is to bring people together to create an eco-system that can sustain the digital economy.”

Simran shared that the initiative is a non-profit set-up and helps organisations become Big Data Savvy. “We will teach those who wish to learn more, a roadmap on how to begin on this journey to becoming a digitalized enterprise. The education is provided for free,” she added.

The training however will be in-depth and cover both soft-skills and hard skills.

Simran Kaur, Director – Partner and Client Engagement, ADAX

“We can’t have Data Scientists who aren’t able to present their ideas to the company board. Where on a good day they speak while staring at the bosses shoes, while on a bad day, they stare at their own,” she said in jest.

The point she brought across was the importance of having not only a tech-savvy Data Scientist, but one who is an all-rounder, understanding communication and being able to bring the solutions and insights that benefit the business as a whole. They have created a standard framework for organisations to run their own training and it is available for use. The training is for working adults and students she added.

Amine, who is working with Big Data, ESB and Data Governance solutions, shared the importance of data wrangling. Talend helps design, scale, collaborate, manage and govern data within data lakes. Founded in 2005, and a leader in both Gartner Magic quadrant and Forrester, Talend provides both open source as well as subscription based solutions.

(L-R) Mr K.B.Ung and Mr Raaj waiting to be ushered into the training room

Amine says that with the graphical data provided by Talend, it frees up time to make important business decisions. “An interesting use case is when a frequented online portal analysed their customer paths and realized that those who went to the site, they didn’t make purchases. From this data that was discovered, the company added a pop-up just before the customer clicked on the website, saying if they purchased today, they would receive a 20% discount. This increased their sales many fold,” he shared.

Amine Slimane, Senior Pre-sale consultant at Talend

These insights provide by Talend, assists the Data Scientist to make the right decision as it is a quick and simple form of data wrangling. Talen is able to receive data from over 900 connectors at any speed the client wishes and send out the insights instantly.

“On Talend, everything is graphic, not code. This helps us to evolve with new technologies, which in turn protects the client. Talend doesn’t charge the client if there are newer versions,” he added.

For 2018, Amine shares Talen will be looking into Data Stream in Cloud, Multicloud solutions and enabling end to end IoT platforms. As Talend is agnostic in their solutions, they are able to adopt and provide solutions for wrangling data within any industry.

Amine says that research has shown 90% of data lakes will become useless due to lack of governance, indisciplined users and lack of rational data flow. With data wrangling or pre-processing, they are able to solve this issue easily.

Speaking to participants after the event, Anthony Dennis who was interested to know more about wrangling data, said that he found the talk very interesting and was happy to know that working professionals as himself has a chance to look into moving career with little or no monetary investment. Students who attended the event also found it interesting as some of them were already taking courses in data science and were asked by their lecturers to attend seminars and talks.