Unveiling Project Shapeshift Nov. 9th at Druid Summit 2021

It’s an exciting time here at Imply and for the Apache Druid community at large. What started out as an effort to build a new type of analytics database has grown into a community of over 1,000 organizations worldwide actively using Apache Druid.

Underlying this growth is a shift in the very meaning of the word “analytics”. There is a new category within data analytics emerging which is not centered in the world of reports and dashboards (the purview of data analysts and data scientists), but instead centered in the world of applications (the purview of software developers, architects and product managers).

Why is a new category within analytics emerging that is centered around building applications? Because of the need for organizations to internally gain real-time visibility into their business and/or to externally extend analytics visibility to their customers. When it comes to internal visibility, Druid is behind
Netflix’s observability platform,
Salesforce.com’s edge intelligence platform, and more. When it comes to external-facing applications, Druid is behind
Twitter’s Mopub Analytics Application,
Atlassian Analytics, and more.

Why Druid? The answer is best summed up by lead engineers at Confluent, who in their Druid Summit 2021 session will outline how they built Confluent’s internal observability platform and externally-facing Health+ application on Druid, and how, in their words, “operating multi-tenant services requires fine-grained visibility down to the individual user, tenant, or application behavior, where most traditional monitoring stacks fail to scale or become cost-prohibitive.”

These words make it clear. Modern organizations need a new, purpose-built analytics database to meet their objectives to understand every aspect of their service in real-time, and to also potentially share these insights with their customers. And Druid is the answer.

But the work is not done. Not even close to done. We are now at an inflection point with the adoption of Apache Druid, at the cusp of every organization realizing the new ability—and thus new competitive imperative—to build modern analytics applications. It’s now time to take the Druid experience to the next level, and to make building modern analytics applications ubiquitous throughout every organization in the world.

With this in mind, on November 9th, Imply will unveil Project Shapeshift.

In his keynote at Druid Summit, Gian Merlino, Imply CTO and co-founder, and one of the original creators of Apache Druid, will introduce Project Shapeshift to the world. Shapeshift is a reimagination of the Druid experience and the process of building modern analytics applications to fit our cloud-native, developer-centric world. As Shapeshift progresses, with major contributions to open source Apache Druid as well as to Imply products, we believe the world will have the ability to build modern analytics applications with newfound ease and power, and ultimately have a significantly better way to gain real-time insights into their business/extend insights to their customers. Whether you are new to the world of Druid, a member of the open source Druid community, or an Imply customer with production-live applications, you will like what you are going to hear in Gian’s keynote.

Why embark on a dedicated project? Because we have seen it as a proven path to success.

Those of you that are familiar with the Kafka ecosystem and our friends at Confluent have likely heard of Project Metamorphosis, an 8-month initiative aimed at transforming the Kafka experience. Through the course of Metamorphosis, Confluent made major advancements to open source Apache Kafka and to its commercial offerings (notably to Confluent Cloud), and in the end, delivered to the world a fundamental data platform that is cloud-native, complete, and everywhere.

As we see it, Project Metamorphosis was much more than a product effort. It was an industry-defining strategic statement on the course for sustained success for an open source technology and for the commercial entity built around it. It established that the path forward to massive, ubiquitous adoption of a new data infrastructure lies in a strong commitment to advancing the underlying open source technology coupled with a strong commitment to re-engineer the very foundation of that technology to be truly cloud-native. It’s of course a tall order to do both, and arguably, it’s an outcome that can only be achieved by the original creators of the open source technology supported by the organization which they lead. This is what Project Shapeshift is all about.

Join us at Druid Summit to hear Gian unveil the details of Project Shapeshift and see a demo of what is to come. As I mentioned earlier, whether you are new to the world of Druid, a member of the open source Druid community, or an Imply customer with production-live applications, you are going to like what you hear.

Register Now for Druid Summit!