The Next Chapter

By Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO and co-founder, Treasure Data

Today all of us at Treasure Data enter a new phase in our history after being acquired by global chip technology and IoT services leader company Arm. It is a time of immense opportunity – as we’ll gain from the investment power of being part of Arm.

You can find many details here, but I wanted to take a moment to discuss what this will mean for Treasure Data and our customers.

Since the day Kaz Ota, Sada Furuhashi and I started Treasure Data back in 2011, we’ve stuck to our core vision and mission: to fundamentally transform how technology and humans interact. We planned to enable the future business economy, where data became a new currency. We knew that for any business, the ability to make sense of its data and turn it into actionable insights would deliver a competitive edge. Our original breakthroughs handled streaming throughput of big data from many sources, and our open source solution we created, Fluentd, helped to automate and overcome this. Since its release into the community (along with more than a dozen other open source contributions) it has become a standard used by the largest companies in the world. Today, we are acknowledged experts in data management and our customers are increasing efficiencies, driving new business opportunities and generating new value. We are in partnerships built on trust. Our customers have become experts in data-unlocking and this has led to a new dimension of possibilities.

Bringing data insights to all companies

Treasure Data’s customers are unique. According to Forbes, more than half of all organizations struggle with the volume of siloed and scattered data. It means many spend up to 80 percent of their time integrating, formatting and processing data for analysis. Marketing organizations, in particular, struggle. While having greater insight into customers’ experiences has true value, getting to the information often means spending days and weeks analyzing data.

Treasure Data has helped more than 325 customers – including some of the world’s most recognizable brands and mostly large enterprises – generate new data opportunities. We created a sophisticated cloud-based data management platform that companies leverage to responsibly collect and understand massive amounts of data, transform their businesses and create new customer experiences. Beyond triple digit revenue growth YoY and numerous recognitions including our recent debut in the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Data Management Solutions for Analytics, we also created a great culture along the way, one that Forbes recognized as one of the best cloud companies to work for in the cloud computing space. This journey over the past 7 years has been the greatest treasure of my life and I want to express a sincere thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has been part of it. And now from today, as part of Arm, I look forward to this new exciting chapter.

Together with Arm, we are looking at a platform of technologies from device-to-data: secure harvesting of data from networks of IoT devices, to the convergence of disparate data streams, and the visualization of that data and the generation of insights leading to actions. Arm named that platform today: The Arm Pelion IoT Data Platform.

Expanding our areas of focus

Our data management platform is well-established, but we know there’s much more we can do to help companies understand and interact with their customers. We think we’ve really only just uncovered the tip of the data management and insights iceberg. A major focus will remain in unlocking customer data, in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) market, working closely with existing partners and building new relationships. Although our focus on the CDP market will accelerate, we see a new and exciting opportunity go beyond CDP to towards Device Data Platforms (DDP). That is what makes today’s news so exciting and it brings us very firmly into the world of IoT data.

Data’s Next Great Frontier: Human and Device Interaction

IoT and data-driven businesses are transforming all aspects of life and industry. Arm and its parent-company Softbank talk about a world of a trillion connected devices by 2035, leading to an information revolution that will have redefined all industries.

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear I agree. During the past few years, companies began talking to us about solving their big data analytics challenges, and how to deal with the oceans of new information coming from their intelligent devices networks. They wanted to understand how billions of devices could interact seamlessly with each other – and how to build bridges that would deliver constant business insights. The challenge was a true opportunity for Treasure Data as we’re uniquely positioned to handle the scale of machine data and customer data, and we understand how to bring it all together.

For us, the next phase is about how we bring together customer data and IoT systems through new device-to-data platforms. Moving forward, I believe that DDP will be the birthplace of new business models grounded in insights from IoT devices that will become a primary source of customer data. In his blog, Dipesh Patel, president of IoT services group (ISG) at Arm, describes how IoT will give organizations “superpowers.” But these powers can only be released by enabling organizations to harness and extract insights from their IoT devices. This is where Treasure Data and our own abilities will help.

The Treasure Data enterprise CDP platform is already delivering valuable insight on customer actions and device interactions. Our leadership and innovation in CDP won’t change but will build on that experience to integrate with Arm’s technologies. Together we can offer something unique that will be part of the next frontier of humans and technology interactions.

I’m truly humbled and honored to continue this story and have no doubt that this next chapter will be even more rewarding than the last.