Data Is Everything… But Who’s in Charge?

Hey everyone, welcome to another Text Drunk tv, uh, interview. I'm really happy to introduce you to my next guest. It's his first time here on Text Drunk tv.

His name is Kevin Aliko. I hope I got that right. Kevin is the, I guess CEO of Emeritus for Syntax.

Is that, is that correct, Kevin? That That is correct. That is correct.

Fantastic. Welcome to Tech Drug tv. It's always good to have another New Yorker arm with me, so I feel I feel comfortable already.

Um, Kevin, before we jump into, we're gonna talk about chief data offices and, and data management and so forth, but let's talk a little bit about Kevin. As I said, you're a, you're a New Yorker, lifelong New Yorker, but give people a sense kind of, of your journey, Kevin, of Sure. How you wanna be here, And I appreciate the time.

Thank you, Alan. So, uh, as you said, lifelong New Yorker, um, born and bred. Uh, I started my career in financial services, uh, worked for, uh, chase Matton Bank.

And if I talk about the projects I was working on at the time, it was, uh, uh, working with 37 45 cluster controllers in branches. And the new technology at that time was bringing local area networks into all the branch networks. So, did that for a while and modernized, uh, chase Bank back in the day.

And then moved down to, uh, wall Street, working for a real-time market data company. And at that time it was really taking, uh, I'll say all the, at the time it was all based on tandems, taking tandem news feeds and bringing, uh, stock information down to traders floors. And, and we built, uh, a, an application based on Windows and brought in all those tickers and news feeds and brought real time stock information back to, uh, the brokers.

So then at that point in time, started to move over to, uh, the vendor side worked from companies. Uh, Novell was part of, uh, uh, an acquisition with VMware SpringSource, so it was everything Sure. In terms of, um, building Java based applications.

So at the time, uh, Paul Moritz was the CEO of VMware acquired SpringSource to be able to bring and build applications on type of that virtualization technologies. Uh, stayed there for a little while, then moved on to another company that was really focused on bringing ERP applications to the cloud. We were acquired by, uh, EMC at the time, then Dell, and then that was brought me to Syntax about five years ago.

So, um, wow. Yeah. You know, that's, uh, that's quite a history.

You've been a lot of, a lot of your history revolves around that EMC, VMware kind of conglomerate, right? That it it was, It was all about it. It, it, it blended between application and infrastructure and really those core mission critical applications and how to provide, uh, the best set of services around those core applications.

So, yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

That's great. Great, great, great. Uh, story, Kevin, I feel like everyone's heard of Syntax, but very few people really understand Sure.

Syntax. So if you wouldn't mind be, be the, uh, the translator here, how would you describe Syntax to our audience? Absolutely.

So, um, and it, it really attracted me because like you stated, I had heard of Syntax, but never really understood the full history. And it, it really amazed me at the time when I was looking at the organization. They were just shy of about, uh, 50 years, uh, within the industry, which kind of shocked me.

And when I talked to the founder, and the founder is still here with us, working with us and still leading us, which was great. Um, they started out as a consulting company and they morphed into actually building their own ERP back in the day during their, during the seventies. And actually we still have, it's probably about 35 customers still running that ERP that we wrote almost 50 years ago.

And, um, at that point, they started to partner with, uh, companies like JDE and then that got acquired by Oracle and PeopleSoft, and then they morphed into EBS and then started other acquisitions around, um, SAP. So our lens has always been through the ERP, so that highly structured mission critical, important data that runs the organization. But as you know, um, the ERP has what I always say is a large gravitational force.

It it ties into all the rest of the business applications. So the lens is always through the ERP, but then we dive out into the rest of the data and the rest of the organization to ensure that you're getting the, the most and most impactful usage of that data, uh, throughout the rest of the business. Excellent.

50 years. I know. Wow.

Think about that. com. I, I helped take a company public.

We were in early, what they call a SP application service provider. Sure. And so we were offering hosted versions of PeopleSoft, hosted versions of Oracle.

Yep. And, uh, Lotus Notes and, and others before this, you know, VMware really hasn't caught on, it isn't the late nineties. Sure.

There is no cloud, so to speak. We're delivering this stuff. So multi-tenant was kind of a fan.

Yeah. And, uh, even, even bandwidth, you know, you're delivering it over T one at best lines or at worst, hopefully, you know, at best was a T three lie. It was, those were wild, wild West days.

And They were expensive too back in the day. Oh my God. Talking about about 45 grand.

I think it was like about $40,000 a month for a T three line. But what I was talking About being down on Wall Street, we were using the modern technology, ATM frame relay and ISDN dial backup to be able to support these brokerage f*****g so Well, you always had to have, in case you stuff went to hell in the hand basket, you had those moments. Um, anyway, so your CEO of Americas, which kinda leads me, we leave that they probably have a separate business unit for the Americas A a.

Absolutely. So we are a global organization, um, significant business within, uh, north America. We have offices that are in South Africa, Germany, France, London, global, uh, within Mexico, within Slovakia.

So it's a little bit over 3000 employees at this point in time. Um, but, uh, I, I run the North American, uh, business for syn pax. Fantastic.

Great, great, great story. So Kevin, you know, the whole ERP business, it, it, it, look in the seventies, you were absolutely pioneers, right? But the ERP business has really undergone some drastic changes, evolutions, especially in the last two, three years with the advent and rise of the, all of this AI and, and so forth.

And, and I would, if I had to characterize it, I'd say it's been a return to the supremacy of data, right? ERPs, whether you hate 'em, love 'em, what whatever you feel, they're only as good as the data you put into them, right? Yeah.

And, and so we've, we've made a lot of strides in automating, getting data in, uh, observability kind of things and, and acting on that data. And at, at the same time, you know, there was, we started off site a couple years ago, Kevin called digital CXO, because all of a sudden everybody had a C level for everything, right? But one of those CXO titles was Chief Data Officer CDO.

Yeah. And I, and I'll be honest with you, a little confusing, what exactly is the CDO? What is their role?

What, what's, what's kind of their, you know, what's their charge? Yeah. What are they supposed to be doing?

And, and as you and I were talking off camera for a lot of these CDOs early on, it was kind of a, a governance risk, you know, GRC kind of role where, hey, we had to make sure we know where our data is, what data we have, and that we are, you know, from privacy regulations and everything else, doing the right thing with it. But, but that's kind of morphed now. I think what, you know, you, you've got a front row seat on the battle front here.

What do you see? Yeah. So, uh, right now, to me, and I, I think that chief data officer is honestly probably the most exciting role right now.

And as you were saying, originally back in the, when the role first came out, it was strictly about honestly, more security, governance and compliance, which seemed like a, uh, I would say not to offend anyone, sometimes a boring role because you're, you're, you're within the organization and you're putting handcuffs on everyone. And it was about restriction a lot of times, and right. All the different technologies coming out.

And you see the, the maturation of what's happening with AI and analytics. It's really driving the importance of data within the organization. And now that chief data officer, and in a lot of cases it becomes chief Data Officer analytics and ai.

And that person now is not about restriction, but it's about enablement with guardrails. And I, I, I think it's such a critical, and to me, I think 2026 is that inflection point for that individual in that role within the organization to really be a key business, um, enabler and really drive the organization to competitive advantages and using data. 'cause when I look at it historically, data was always an IT asset.

And now this chief data officer really has the opportunity to drive and understand that data is really a business asset and it's gonna drive our, our, the company's future growth. Sure. Is, I mean, data is, is the cornerstone of, of your company's crown jewels of the assets, right?

Because your ERP doesn't work without it, but either does your CRM either does anything you have without your data and, and you know, the role of the data officer is, is I, I guess to make the company aware of what you actually have in that asset, right? EE exactly. And that's, it's not a Blow up.

Yeah. And, and that's where sometimes I think it could be challenging, dependent upon where that person sits within the organization. I think this individual really has to have a seat, a pie, and be at that table because as I said, they're really an enabler with guardrails.

And if it's done properly, because previously, I, I think a lot of the data was really centralized and that became the bottleneck. And what has to happen today based upon all the technologies and the speed of which the business has to move, it has to become decentralized. And you need that chief data officer to really, um, put that framework in place to allow that decentralization and allow the innovation to happen as close to the business as possible.

And I think this, to me, this is the, the most important thing, because over the years you've seen it and business really becoming closer and closer at this point now with all the different technologies. It's, it's not just close. They're, they're one in the same and they're intertwined.

And that chief data officer really is the one that's providing that framework, those guardrails to allow that innovation, acceleration, and competitive advantage for the business. Agreed. I, I couldn't say better myself.

Um, you know, Kevin, but there's also been, again, with AI and some of these newer technologies, but even before the whole generative and now agent ai, I think burst on the screen, on the scene, um, there's been a lot of progress in getting at this data, right? It, it no longer is some amers amers blob living somewhere, right? It is, data is dispersed throughout our organization, but of course, the problem was what is that?

What's in that data? What does that data say? What, what actionable intelligence can we gather from that data?

Right? And as you said, how can we allow our users to access that data, contribute to that data, analyze that data in a safe, secure, fast way, right? EE Exactly.

Where it travels at the speed of business EE Exactly. And I think that that's really the, the problem that the chief data data offer data officer is solving from the perspective of as, as we were talking about the ERP, that was always very highly structured, well understood, and governed data. So we knew that data was clean.

As you get further and further away from the ERP and closer to the business, you start seeing a lot more of unstructured data. And the problem was, is that as we talk about AI analytics and all the other data technologies, the, the pace at which that was, um, improving and maturing was significant. The piece of, I would say the, the data cleanliness and the, the data management didn't mature at the same rate that these technologies were.

So what we're seeing right now is that everyone is trying to do something with AI and analytics. And what they're finding is they're, they're stumbling a lot within the pilot phase, and they're having a hard time demonstrating the ultimate business value. Because as they get deeper into it and try to solve the business problems that are presented to them, they realize that, as we were talking about in the very beginning, data is that new currency date, AI and all, and analytics and all these other technologies don't solve data problems.

They, their, their outputs to, and they run on Data E Exactly. So they need the data. They, they, they're realizing right now they're like, oh, we can't really solve this problem because the data we have isn't accurate.

It's not clean, it's not making sense. It's given us hallucinations in terms of, um, the, the answers that we thought we were gonna get are just completely wrong. So they're having to take a step back.

And to me, that's, um, it's a demonstration that you didn't have a chief data officer and didn't have that, um, process in place. And right now these new technologies are exposing what the organization hadn't been doing. So that's where unfortunately, you've seen a lot of people stumble and they're saying, oh, you know what?

AI really isn't gonna work. And it's not about the technology not working, it's about the organization and having the mature process and having the ability to access good, clean data that can represent what the business needs to lead it to a competitive advantage. Gotcha.

Kevin, we're running low on time. I want to bring it home here. Sure.

How did Syntax help with this? So, um, as I said, from from the beginning, we've always looked at organizations through the lens of the ERP, which was really that structured data. Through the years we've had the ability to be able to go on these customer journeys and bring it out closer to the business.

So we've been working for a number of years now from an analytics and even from an AI perspective and helping organizations through this. So we have a, a number of, uh, customers. We have a, a significant team in place to be able to meet the customer where they are within their journey.

It's not only the ERP journey, but what I would say is their data journey and let's understand where you're at. And a lot of times, times, what we're doing is we take a step back with the customer and provide a level of workshops with them to see where they are within their journey. It's a very honest and transparent conversation to make sure that we're not setting ourselves up for failure.

Let's find the right set of outputs we can provide and the right, um, use cases that if you're not really there with your data, let's not try to fake it. Let's get there. But let's also find the low hanging fruit that we could still provide value back to the business as we're actually going through that data cleansing and, and that data governance process.

So it's really getting all aspects of the business together in one room and having that honest conversation and mapping out what's gonna be, uh, the best move for that organization to move forward on this journey so they can continue to move forward versus sitting and going around in a circle and finding, uh, uh, a number of failures and not being able to move forward. So it's guiding them on this journey. Love it.

Good stuff. Kevin. One last thing.

For people wanting to get more information on Syntax, where do they go? com. S-Y-N-T-A-X-T-A-X.

That's it. All right, man. Hey Kevin, thanks for coming off here on Tech Truck TV and talking a little chief Data officer at Data, uh, challenges with us.

We appreciate it. Keep up the great work at Syntax, come back and visit us. Absolutely.

Always love tot talk to a fellow New Yorker, so I really appreciate it. Absolutely, man. Thank you so much.

All right. Forget about it. Ke Kevin, Kevin Aliko, uh, CEO of Americas for Syntax here on Tech Trump tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back.