December 7, 2022
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10 Minutes

Ellie 2022 Recap - Data Product Design

Company Vision
Product
Development
Johannes Hovi
CEO

Hi! As we are getting closer to the end of the year, I’d like to share some updates on behalf of the Ellie team and give an overview of the passing year.

Our team is growing

First things first, let’s talk about our people. A number of new team members have joined us on our ambitious mission of connecting people and data through design and technology. Our team is really versatile, with ages ranging from 20s to 50s, both genders, and nationalities from Vietnam to France. They are a really international bunch of super-talented people, whom I am very proud to work with!

Ellie’s roadmap

During this year we’ve been working on various important features and improvements for our easy-to-grasp data modeling tool, but most importantly we’ve been heavily investing our efforts into the Ellie API engine - enabling metadata transfers in and out of Ellie and integrations with other tools.

There are quite many new things coming up for Ellie, and that deserves a blog of its own (stay tuned). But to summarize, these have to do with Ellie becoming even more deeply integrated with the existing IT and data stacks and assisting you in validating and designing data products through data modeling. 

Design products, that customers love

The data industry is in turmoil and evolving really rapidly. Data is becoming a critical part of any business operations, which creates demand for new ways of thinking. New concepts, methodologies, schools of thought, terminology, and tools keep emerging constantly. All these new ideas, like data mesh and data contracts, are game-changing and industry-shifting and we aim to bring more clarity when applying these new concepts. We envision Ellie as an important part of shaping this future, as the world’s first data product design platform.

Great design, leads to great execution

With clear data product design, data engineering becomes a straightforward task, it mainly becomes an execution phase as the majority of thinking, planning, and fundamental product activities have already been agreed on, and well documented through Ellie.ai.

What we see now in data space, is just a start. Companies are at the very beginning of their journey to becoming truly data-driven and are just scratching the surface of AI & ML applications. The whole landscape will change a lot in the coming years, and we at Ellie have a pretty clear idea of where it’s heading.

We’re growing globally!

Back in June, I mentioned that 2022 is an important year for our company’s future. This was the year we felt that Ellie is finally ready to be offered globally and we’ve set on a mission to prove that. I’m really proud to say that we’ve validated this thesis. Our revenue is growing rapidly, but more importantly, nearly half of new customers are coming from abroad, with new Ellie users all over the world from New Zealand all the way to Iceland.

“Ellie is an excellent option for modeling the data warehouse. It provides a good environment that combines data documentation, modeling, and easy enterprise access.  It is simple to use, yet offers the flexibility needed for a great modeling experience,” - Bjarki Stefansson, Sidekick Health

Our message to the data industry

Our core message to the data industry is that most challenging data struggles have little to do with technology and a lot to do with humans. In the data space too quickly do we jump to planning what data architecture we should have, say Snowflake + dbt, before understanding why we are doing this whole thing in the first place? 

Currently happening in the data space.

With Ellie, you can take a breath, figure out your fundamentals, and make sure what you do makes sense, before committing to building complicated data pipelines.

Telling our story

To spread the word and share this vision, our team has attended multiple events this year. such as Big Data London.

Stan and Markus at Big Data London with their iconic scandalous shirts.

Our CPO, Juha just came back from his trips to Australia, New Zealand and UK where he met our new customers and spoke about Data modeling in Data Mesh at DAMA Melbourne and IRM UK. He also had an opportunity to meet John Giles in person, a world-renowned Data Vault and data modeling expert.

John Giles and Juha having a get-together in Australia.

I’ve personally had a chance to attend Slush this year and tell our story to the VC crowd. 

Johannes Hovi, Ellie.ai CEO, at Slush 2022

Tune in for more!

We’ve also just published our first Fireside Data Chat:

And we’re participating at a couple of great online events before the year’s end:

Fresh vision, fresh brand

As we’ve refreshed our vision and set on the ambitious mission of making it happen, we’ve also felt that it would be important to update our brand in order to capture our new way of thinking. We’ve completely revamped our website, and design language, and have changed the logo of our company.

Final thoughts

I’m extremely proud of our team and what we’ve accomplished this year. I’d like to thank all our customers without whom we wouldn’t be where we are today, and who see the importance of what we do. And say kudos to our consultant and software partners who played an important role in this year being a success.