We are entering a new age of the democratization of data. The shape of the modern enterprise is changing at an expansive rate—where every business is a data business, and where data is key to every role and every function.
But data is not used or leveraged uniformly. Different, newly empowered stakeholders within the enterprise have different needs, different applications, different use cases—all of them strategically critical, but no two alike.
Legacy enterprise systems were not designed to serve these different stakeholders. Typically, the more applications used by an enterprise, the more siloed the data. Solutions that seamlessly and differentially serve the new data requirements of all stakeholders have simply not existed until now.
Today, the ability to make data flow has become a central, mission critical requirement for every business. The explosive shift to cloud has removed many of the gating factors for data fluidity at scale. We believe the companies that can help accelerate and ease the free flow of data for these newly empowered end users will be tomorrow’s big winners.
In other words, there is a huge opportunity for companies that can enable a truly data-driven, stakeholder aligned enterprise in the cloud computing era.
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The rise of cloud data warehouses is one of the biggest transformative trends in enterprise today. In Q2 alone, Snowflake reported upwards of $1 billion in annualized revenue and grew at north of 100% year-over-year. Over the next decade, hundreds of billions of dollars of historical investment in legacy databases will shift to the cloud.
Fivetran’s superpower—simply put—is making data flow to a central location in the cloud. While it operates mostly in the background as data plumbing, Fivetran is the modern data pipeline company built for the cloud to seamlessly move data from many different sources into cloud data warehouses. With the acquisition of HVR, Fivetran has accelerated its ability to service those enterprises with on-premise databases like SAP and Oracle as they navigate their digital transformation journey. This plumbing is mission critical for the new stakeholder aligned enterprise, as evidenced by Fivetran’s meteoric growth.
We think Fivetran provides several important benefits for the modern stakeholder aligned enterprise.
- It enables the centralization and democratization of data so that everyone across the organization can leverage data sets—from marketing to sales to customer service, not just internal data teams.
- Every new cloud application an enterprise uses creates its own data store, leading to silos. With Fivetran, an enterprise can create a shared understanding of their customers, business, and people across silos: a prerequisite for stakeholder collaboration within an enterprise.
- It also enables data flow across companies, enabling the sharing of data with key partners, suppliers and other external stakeholders.
- Finally, it solves the historic trade-off between speed and scalability by centralizing data into a single location. Fivetran’s product delivers quick time-to-value. The average install time is about 5 minutes, allowing any enterprise to quickly deploy and immediately start capturing the benefits.
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When George and Taylor set out to build Fivetran in 2012, very few could see what they saw. The world looked very different. They had to be patient during those early days. But like truly great founders, they had resilience and conviction. They have built what we believe will be one of the next foundational companies to meet the new data needs and challenges of the stakeholder aligned enterprise. We are delighted to continue to be part of their amazing journey.