2nd Watch Introduces Specialized Data Analytics Practice

The pioneering managed cloud provider has been forming specialty practice groups as enterprise customers mature up the cloud stack and look for advanced solutions, including the ability to make faster data-driven decisions.

2nd Watch, a managed cloud provider on the forefront of bringing innovative solutions to market, has launched its latest specialty practice group, one focused on enabling enterprises to make data-driven decisions.

The Seattle-based Amazon Web Services and Microsoft cloud partner’s new DataOps managed service aims “to get people looking at their data as quickly as possible,” Robert Whelan, practice manager of data engineering and analytics at 2nd Watch, told CRN.

The data and analytics service addresses the needs of enterprises who completed cloud migrations in recent years and now look to drive more benefit out of the advanced capabilities provided by their hyper-scale cloud providers, Whelan said.

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After a decade in business, 2nd Watch has gotten highly proficient at migrating enterprises out of their data centers, Whelan said.

“But what we’ve seen in the past year or so, the broader market is starting to mature up the cloud stack,” he told CRN, and “maturing in the cloud is a completely different business case.”

DataOps is the latest specialized service from 2nd Watch that delivers that kind of advanced functionality. 2nd Watch introduced DevOps and centralized security services in 2018, followed by a cost assessment package for cloud migrations.

The new data and analytics service primarily deploys data lakes and serverless infrastructure to get enterprise customers up-and-running quickly. On the AWS side, that means piecing together S3 storage, the Lambda serverless environment, and AWS Glue, a serverless ETL (extract, transform, load) that packages the Spark runtime.

“That’s going to get people off the ground,” Whelan said. And then when those customers need traditional analytics out of their data lakes, 2nd Watch pulls in non-serverless AWS data services like Redshift and Aurora.

2nd Watch launched the service and specialized practice group that supports it in December and is seeing interest from customers across industries, especially health care and financial services. Most of them migrated to cloud two or three years ago, Whelan said.

“Generally, we don’t get them right when we migrate because they’re still letting the dust settle and getting used to pace of decision-making in the cloud,” he said.

But those enterprises soon see they’re making decisions faster, he said, and they realize they can’t trust their gut like they did before at that pace.

“And if we can’t trust our gut, we need more data,” Whelan told CRN.

“They say I need to bring data into my decision-making process, and I’d like to use the cloud if I can do it quickly and cost-effectively.”