Vendors: What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2023?

Helping customers with reduced budgets and head counts start or complete data projects will be critical. Focusing on the outcomes their customers need, channel partners can bring their expertise and experiences to the table to quickly architect and build a solution that meets these needs. Focus will have to be on reducing complexity and cost in order to get to those outcomes on time and on budget. This means 'pre-built' solutions focused on the verticals' specific needs will be required. Together ALTR and our channel partners will be making one-click solutions to provide value to customers from day one. The times of 6-months delivery time and 6 figure costs are gone - customers want cheaper solutions that drive value right away without needing bells and whistles.

Vendors: What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2023?

Automation and interconnectivity. We'll be addressing both from the lens of helping customers save time and money as they're facing shrinking budgets and head counts. We are going to realize these objectives by investing in open-source projects to connect and automate manual data governance tasks. The data ecosystem is made up of a few layers: the database (like Snowflake), ETL (like Matillion), BI (Tableau), cataloging (Alation), and data access control/data security (ALTR). These systems work better for the customer when they communicate and share information. Taking a data access request down from 1 week to 1 minute requires ALTR and Alation, for example, to be connected and able to interoperate. Learning from Alation when a certain user needs access to data can trigger ALTR to make a data access policy change in Snowflake automatically, without human intervention. By doing this with open-sourced connectors, customers can quickly and cheaply interconnect these two enterprise systems to realize automation at scale.

Vendors: What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2023?

Having to do more with less. Very rarely do the bosses say, "You know what, we should slow our growth this year and not try to achieve as much as we planned." It almost always ends up with less people doing the same if not more work. This is where software and automation will be important. Customers will need to measure twice and cut once when it comes to building their data solutions. They should take the time to not only find the right partners with the needed expertise but also one that will focus on the customer's bottom line, not their own. You cannot afford a six month implementation that costs six figures. You need incremental progress each day after you have decided to 'cut' (select a solution).

Vendors: What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2023?

A focus on vertical solutions will make the difference. Financial services data users have certain needs - ensure those needs can be met with a single click. Healthcare providers all look at the same type of data in the same way - help them get to insights faster by building solutions that do exactly what they need. Channel partners will be successful in 2023 if they understand their value is in reducing time to outcome for the business. A generic tool or solution works great when you have the time and slack in your budget. Purpose built tools from channel partners that give the needed outcomes on day one will win because they are specifically solving the problems at hand.

My top priority for 2023 is:

Enablement. I want as many people as possible to be able to use ALTR's software to protect and govern access to data. I want the world to know how easy it can be to solve hard problems around data security and governance. The way we plan to achieve that is by ensuring users can acquire ALTR's software at an affordable price (starts at $0!), take advantage our of enablement resources to get into production quickly, and connect flexibly and seamlessly with partner solutions to build an integrated enterprise-wide data governance solution.