Data provides a wealth of knowledge that can help businesses make targeted choices. Data can help you find out which marketing campaigns connect most with your target audience, find revenue drivers & bottlenecks in sales processes and which business decisions are most likely to pay off in the long run. Businesses invest millions of dollars in building data teams with the primary goal of becoming data-driven. But all too often, data teams are disconnected from the rest of the business, producing data artifacts that have a little or no concrete impact on business outcomes.
In his decade of experience working as a software engineer from small startups to big enterprises, Wasif Aleem witnessed this disconnect firsthand. "My opinion is that most data teams are affected by shiny object syndrome and have a paradox of choices when it comes to data tooling," says Aleem. "Secondly, most data teams operate on blind faith-that is, they don't have enough context to know, measure and operate in a way that provides their organization a substantial competitive advantage over a long term."
Someone like Aleem is well-positioned to identify and address this issue. After graduating, Aleem began working as a software engineer. His first role was to work with a product for users to securely store and manage their overall digital footprint. From there, he transitioned to Evive Health, where he worked his way up to Senior Software Engineer over the course of four years. During this time, he obtained an MS in Computer Science from the University of Buffalo, specializing in databases and distributed systems.
As a quickly rising software engineer, Aleem worked for two years as a Software Development Engineer for Amazon Web Services, then as a Senior Software Engineer for a financial planning startup in San Francisco. He then landed a director-level role at Geode Capital, a 800+ billion dollar asset management firm. In his role at Geode, Aleem led, designed, and developed next generation data platform solutions.
With such a wealth of experience, Aleem identified that most data analytics tooling in practice is not as mature and outcome driven compared to other disciplines like software engineering. Software engineering principles like version control, testing, CI/CD, separation of development and production environments are well understood to be critical when building well designed software, where as data analytics in comparison at majority of companies do not leverage these principles. Combined with the current economic reality, data teams need to prove value to their organizations by focusing on bigger problems directly impacting their core business. He helped create an idea to address these issues facing data teams and provide them with an all-in-one data platform solution, and Reactual was funded.
Reactual aims to solve a massive and complex problem that has existed in the data space for a long time without truly being solved, it not only helps data teams become more efficient-it's the only product in the market that aims to connect internal business processes and analytics. This makes data teams operate with a level of accuracy that hasn't existed before.
It's clear from Aleem's success that he has the clear potential to change the data analytics industry for the better. When it comes to Aleem's future goals, his plans are no less ambitious - "I intend to keep on working everyday to change the way business operate".
