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Ritesh Ranjan is the Lead Architect at Sky, Europe’s leading media and broadcasting house, responsible for building and maintaining emerging solutions like the Data Mesh and Data Fabric. Ritesh is a Certified Professional Cloud Architect with a demonstrated history of working in the telecommunications, media, and the banking industry. He is incredibly skilled in Google Cloud Platform, Big Data Analytics, and Data Warehousing. Ritesh is an avid sports fan and enjoys playing cricket and badminton outside of work. In fact, he has spent many years on a fast-bowling club team.

Ritesh Ranjan

Lead Data Architect, Sky

When we started implementing a Data Mesh, we quickly discovered that Starburst was the leading company in the space.

Case Study Video

What inspired you to go with Starburst?

With our data so spread out, it was proving to be a lengthy task to access it. Our ETL pipeline and deployment process was averaging a two-month timeline just to get data to our end users, which was inefficient and time-consuming, holding us back from insights that could drive our business forward.

We realized that it would be far more efficient to embrace a decentralized Data Mesh architecture through Starburst as its abstraction layer. As a result, we were able to give our end users the flexibility they needed by allowing them to access all data from one single point, thereby reducing our time-to-insight from months to minutes. With Starburst, data users can access the data faster and more efficiently. No other product in the market has the capabilities that Starburst has!

Where does Starburst fit in your overall data strategy? Which critical technologies are you integrating with Starburst?

Starburst is an essential part of our overarching Data Mesh architecture that gives our users the much needed flexibility to access data through a single point rather than having to go around to ten different data sources. Plus, when we can give the right access to business users, it helps Sky accelerate its overall business goals.

We integrate Starburst with all of our technologies, including GCP, AWS, and Tableau. By doing this, if users have a query that they need to perform, they can access all the data and information they need without having to dig through all of our technologies. Starburst integrates particularly well with Tableau and helps us run more accurate business reports while also providing faster access to data.

What are your three favorite Starburst features?

My three favorite features are:

  • Caching tables: We cache tables from our legacy system in the cluster, so that it’s possible to query those tables in Starburst itself
  • Security and Apache Ranger: We can easily set policies for individual users and filter access at the table, column, or row level
  • Integration with BI tools like Tableau: Users gain fast access to new data sources without having to learn a new tool or wait for ETL

Which business outcomes are you most proud of?

With Starburst, we are able to do things that we couldn’t even think of before. Our time-to-insight has been drastically reduced. We have gone from months to minutes in terms of querying and insights. In the future, with Starburst Stargate, we also hope to leverage the cluster capability to make accessing data across borders seamless while remaining compliant with data governance regulations.

What success have you been able to measure?

When we initially began using Starburst, we had a series of metrics on which we measured the success of the application. These were connecting to different data sources on-premise and on cloud, accessing data quickly, and being able to have fine-grained security access. Starburst met all of these metrics and was an immediate success.

Do you think decentralized data access and Data Mesh are the future of analytics at scale?

Decentralized access is definitely the future. We have learned from the past that a centralized data approach just doesn’t work. It is expensive and it is difficult to manage the constant copying and moving of data that is required.

We are currently in the process of creating data products, which Starburst is really helping with. Previously, without a single point of secure data access, creating a data product was not possible. With the abstraction layer that Starburst provides across different data sources, it has become our analytics engine for the Data Mesh.

Fun Facts

Your First Computer

A HCL computer that my dad gave me in 1999

Astronaut or space tourist?

Space tourist

Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic?

Blue Origin

Star Wars, Star Trek, or the MCU?

MCU

If you could pick a science mission to explore any destination in the solar system, what would you choose?

Jupiter

If you could open an office on any planet, which one would you choose?

Mars, it’s the only planet we could settle on (if we plan correctly!)

If you could name your own star, what would you call it?

Anay, that’s my son’s name!

Did you know?

Ritesh won an all-expense paid trip from India to Thailand at his first job for his fabulous work, and that in fact his first trip out of the country!

Winning with Starburst

"Winning with Starburst means a lot to Sky. Starburst can eliminate a lot of the pain points we have by greatly reducing time-to-insight, allowing us to seamlessly connect important BI tools, and giving the right access to data for our business users. All of our problems of the past will be no longer!"

— Ritesh Ranjan

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