Iker Martinez de Apellaniz

My background is in engineering. My first job in 2007 was already focused on creating reports on excel macros for insights and analytics, but I didn’t know at that time that Data would become my career. After that, I worked on different variations of similar tools, all with a focus on delivering Data to the people who needed it. I saw how the market evolved from uploading excel reports to FTP, to custom-built web tools for dashboarding, to the modern third-party tools we have today such as Tableau and Looker.

Eventually, I moved deeper into the Data availability journey, not only in displaying Data, but also in producing it. Here, I discovered “Big Data” while setting up a “nutch” crawler and my first Hadoop cluster. The natural progression was then to start developing the tools for others to create these Datasets. And once there, I discovered that my strengths were not in creating the tool, but in discovering what the tool should look like, how to make it more user friendly and, most recently, how to develop the platforms and services needed to change the behaviours of a company. This gives companies the opportunity to collectively mature their Data culture, enabling them to create top quality Data products.