The Story of The Data Gang

It was April 2020, the start of the lockdown. As the outside world was shutting down, the technology business was ramping up crazier than ever. Normally, for us in the IT analyst community, we would gather periodically at vendor conferences and bounce ideas off each other. Sure, we competed, but we always found value in comparing notes. The database analyst community is especially close-knit as it is not as trendy as, say, AI, cybersecurity, or FinOps, and so we are a relatively small select group.

With everybody retreating to our home offices, Carl Olofson reached out and asked whether there was some way for us to keep the conversation going to make up for the fact that we weren’t bumping into each other in Vegas, Orlando, or SF. As an independent analyst firm with a Zoom subscription, the light bulb came on: I could set up a monthly get-together without having to wade through corporate red tape.

Informally, The Data Gang™ was born although we didn’t call ourselves that, at least yet. We began an informal monthly Zoom cocktail hour with roughly four or five of us with no set agenda other than to just gather together and talk. There would be the small talk, but as curious minds, we would inevitably drift to the topical and debate the merits of some vendor's major announcement or strategy pivot.

 In those days, we kept the numbers small because we didn’t know how long the lockdown would last or whether we would need to keep the monthly Zoom cocktail hours going. But after the world opened up, we still wanted to keep meeting, and so the group gradually expanded to nearly a dozen of us today.

And the outside world started taking notice. With a combined 250+ years of experience in the database business, The Data Gang™ arguably represents the greatest concentration of database knowledge in the analyst community. Kicking off an annual tradition back in 2022, our inaugural The Year Ahead in Data hosted by David Vellante at theCUBE drew thousands of views during the first week alone. Vendors in the data space began seeking The Data Gang™ out as a focus group for testing their new ideas and engaging us in collaborative engagements based on the notion two (or more) heads are better than one. The Data Gang™ will take this to the next level by working with our industry partners to improve communication and dialog between buyers and sellers.