DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Unlocking Data's Potential: Leadership, Analytics, and Healthcare (ft. Angel Viña)

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

On today's episode of DGTL Voices, Ed welcomes Angel Viña, CEO & Founder at Denodo Technologies to chat leadership, data & analytics, and healthcare. Imagine a world in which business users can immediately and easily access the data they need without worrying about where it is housed, how it is formatted, or how quickly it changes. Learn more about Denodo Technologies - https://www.denodo.com/en.  ----more---- What's on your playlist? You've all answered, now listen in! 🎶 Dive into the beats that keep DGTL Voices inspired! 🎧 Check out our curated Spotify playlist and groove along with us. Don't forget to like and share! 🎵✨ #SpotifyPlaylist #DGTLVoices #MusicInspiration #ShareTheVibes 👉 Listen Now 

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Ed Marks here, welcome to Digital Voices. I'm so excited for you to join us because we have an amazing guest and another CEO, just sharing their perspective on leadership. and also we're going to dive into data analytics a bit and a little around healthcare. So, so excited that you join us.

Thank you. You have many choices of things to listen to. You've chosen us and will make it worth your while. Welcome, Anjal Vinya to Digital Voices. Hi, Ed. Thank you for inviting me. Very pleased to be in this podcast with you. And so we first met really just virtually.

So I've known your company for a while and your leader in day. data analytics across all verticals, many verticals, and we'll talk a little bit about that. But I met you and your company through obviously healthcare and some of the great things that you're doing in healthcare. And so thank you again for joining us. And the first question on Hill that everyone wants to know of all of our guests is what songs are on your playlist. So what kind of music do you like to listen to?

You know, I'm very eclectic. I like all types of music. I'm also a good dancer. So that gives you something that not everybody knows in my company. But if you ask me about what I have as an almost like permanent in my playlist, always some Spanish music, I'm originally from Spain. I like just one musician that I don't know, it's not a bunch of, very well-known here in the US, but Pablo Alvaran, some songs are fantastic.

I really recommend that for you. It's a great, great musician. That, by the way, made his profile in social media, YouTube, you know, posting his music in YouTube, now is a bigger star, super big star. I have Miss Muayde, or Is He Fuera Eja. So the songs that are amazing. I also, like Manah, is probably my favorite band, is a Mexican band with amazing songs,

Mariposa Traitionera, Rajado El Sol, traditional rock, rolling stones, Let Zeppelin, you know, Gemi Shelfare, wild horses. And all Latin music, all Latin music, because, as I said, I love to dance, especially Latin music. And I always have a look at, you know, the new releases.

I try not to lose anything that may be changing the music scenario. Like, for instance, you know, the new country album from Bejon Cé with this amazing version of Jolene, whatever. as you see very interesting. I love eclectic guests and in fact we have our own playlist now. It's called Digital Voices playlist available on Spotify and it's based on your

favorite music. We will add those artists to that list. Tell me about dancing. So what I suspect it's Latin dances. What are your favorite dances to dance? Trumba, Chacha,

all the types of, know, Gumbia. In fact, I mean, I, before Spotify and others, I used to spend weekends, sometimes in weekends, collecting Cuban music. I have in my hard drive that I, where I, you know, store, now everything has been moved to the cloud, but I still keep that hard drive. There's a huge collection of Cuban music from. the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, you know, amazing.

And so that's one of my passions. Yeah, no, that's awesome. I loved to dance. My wife's a dancer, so I've had to learn all the Latin dances. And so that's what we like to do on weekends is do a lot of dancing. I'm not very good, but I'm going to be a good husband and do what my wife likes to do. I'm not a professional either, but I enjoy it. Yeah, that's what it's all about, enjoying the music and dancing.

and the whole connection. What about a life message? Is there a mantra or some sort of slogan, words that you live by? Well, this one, I like to communicate, not to my kids, to my teams, to friends. Always remember the lesson, forget a mistake. I think it tells us a lot about my personality.

Yeah, I like that. That's good. And you've already... Always face life, you know, with a positive forward-thinking attitude, which is... Yeah. And don't get into this loop of being in problems and problems, you know. Let's learn from them to move on.

I like that. We're also collecting... We'll be releasing a collection of everyone's life slogans. So it should make a very interesting and good read. You've already alluded a little bit to Spanish. So Anil, tell us a little bit about your... yourself personally and we'll get into the professional side but tell us a little bit about who you are. Well, I am an entrepreneur by accident because I mean my previous life was as a professor in a university of the Spain.

You know, I was successful in academia. In fact, I reached my 30s tenure for full professorship, which is not that easy. And I think at some point, through my research and stays, especially here in California, I was very lucky not to do it, post-PHD doctorate here in UCLA and at Stanford, where I learned a lot about this other side, which is the use of technology of research to start a business, which was not that common in my ecosystem in Spain.

And 10 years later, after returning from here from California, I was in that moment that the research was definitely an innovation that had an opportunity to become a business. And I decided to take the challenge. That was very much what I did. But without no previous experience as an entrepreneur, not even with the basics to be an entrepreneur. I needed a lot of help to really start the business.

And I was also very fortunate to have people around me that was helping a lot. That's great. And you were, I'm assuming, based on previous comments, born and raised in Spain. Born and raised in Spain, in northwest of Spain. My professional career started in Madrid when I moved to the University of Madrid.

But, yes, very much northwestern Atlantic personality, you know, because we are very proud of our region in Spain. It's at the end of the way, El Camino. I don't know you know these pilgrims route, you know, to Santiago. well, just there at the very end of the Camino

is looking always, you know, to the west. The sunsets are amazing, the beaches are amazing. America is on the other side. That is probably why I'm here now. No, because my dreams were about, you know, looking, you know, imagine a beach in northwest of Spain, you know, at the sunset, looking towards America. And the sun was going there.

I followed the sun. I love it. I did. I think the Camino, to Santiago two years ago with a couple of my sisters. I love that. Yes. I love that region of Spain. It's very beautiful and a lot of history. What about football then? Are you, do you follow what Americans might call soccer? Absolutely. You're touching a very, very emotional piece of me. In fact, I'm following it, of course, my team, the Portivo from a Coruña, that just

last weekend it got a promotion because it was having, it was in trouble the last four or five years. Now we are back to professional soccer because it was in a category that was not even professional. After being one of the top clubs

in Spain, the only nine clubs in Spain that won La Liga, the competition. One of the thing is the Portivo. Only nine in the whole speed. You're not just Madrid, Bartholone and the well-known teams. Yeah. But we are celebrating that we are back on track, hopefully to compete again. So let's see.

That's great. I'm a, yeah, I wish, actually, I wish American sports would follow the same sort of logic and promotions that they do in football around the world in soccer, because it makes a lot of sense and it gives a lot of opportunity to different organizations. So, yeah, let's jump into Dinoto. So what is the reach of in terms of global markets and industries because you're not just health care. So where do you sort of play? Is it, you know, multiple industries? Very much.

I mean, we have a data management platform, we call it the Nodo platform. And it's very agnostic in terms of where this technology can be applied. It's unifying data systems. And, you know, wherever it is, you know, data fragmentation, you know, multiple data system, distributed data, we bring that nice unification that make data access fast, easy, and you can really focus, when you build solutions, applications, you can focus on the usage of the data, on democratizing the data. And this is a problem that happens in all of the fields. Definitely our two best will be healthcare financial services, is where we have not necessarily more custom,

but the larger customers. I mean, it's because both of them, data is very important. You take financial services for risk management, you know, for investments, for commercial banking. Financial services, they're not a company, you know, that stores the money, not the assets.

It's an IT company, basically. Healthcare is becoming a little bit of that. Of course, the deliveries, patient care, you know, you, you know, public health, whatever it is, the focus, but it's very much data in IT vertically, based on sophisticated use of data to really impact the lives of the people, with better health, or adding value to communities with public health or developing new drugs, whatever it is, right? optimizing therapies.

There's so much that data is important for them. So those two verticals are very significantly for us. We have a very large customer base which are sophisticated. They are innovating around data in all these two verticals and the others. And also very spread in different regions. Just for instance, the example that I know that your audience, has significance in healthcare. Hospitals, like the healthcare system in Scotland,

is based, the data management based in the National Health Service of Scotland. Hospitals in different locations here in the US, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, the Davita Kidney Care Network, Mayeux Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, several medical centers, universities like York Hopkins or Rochester.

And you go internationally, again, in Thailand, Samitiyev or in Tunisia, BPJAS, or, again, very strong in cases and customers, you know, in the space adding value with data. But again, I mean, the technology itself is very agnostic and can be applied, you know, in all verticals. And if you go to energy, oil and gas, or you go to the retail or in telco, whatever, you will find, you know, very strong than other customers. Well, I'm glad you're in health care because, you know, data as in the other industries, like you're pointing out, data, you know, is what they say, the, you know, the new oil, you know,

or bold. And you have to be able to manage it. And it's been very difficult just the way healthcare has evolved over time to manage data. heard stories from some of your customers, and that's how we're all connected, the great things that they're doing with your platform to bring together all the fragmented data, bring it into on a single platform, and then be able to mine it to truly transform and bring about higher quality of care and, you know, lower costs, all sorts of good things. What's something about denoto that the average person might not know?

Well, one is anecdotal. I'm the founder of the company, but I'm not employee number one of the company. Not everybody knows. And that was because I was still in my full professor position, you know, when I decided to incorporate the company. So I'm not employee number one. Even some employees, many employees in the other, they don't realize that. I always know, sign, you know, CEO and fund. Right.

But perhaps you ask me, I mean, one of the most unknown things in the market about the Nodo, because we have our core technology where we base our logical approach to data management, which is this idea of unifying multiple data systems. You want to make data access very easy. You go and you get to use the data without needing all the details about how the, what is the technology supporting this fragment of the data? of these other fragment there. So one of the things that

we based out in this, I said, in data virtualization technology. And many people in our market considers data virtualization the opposite of data movement, of ETL, the traditional ETL technologies that consist about, you know, extracting data from one system

and moving the data into another system. And what they don't know is that they know, The NODO, the NODO platform, our technology, has amazing ETL capabilities embedded in the product. We don't promote to create new data systems. We always promote the usage of the data, but there are many situations that you need to move the data, and there's a reason for doing that. And we have these capabilities in the platform, but we don't market that because it's very hard to communicate that.

For us, the main thing is the usage of the data. is not about moving the data to create new data systems. So we are, you know, you have amazing use cases in doing data movement, you know, that is required in order to really have a consistent data ecosystem or in migrating data, know, from existing systems into the cloud, which is, you know, our customers, they do a lot, you know, with our platform. And if you ask me, what of the nodal is less known in the the market, it would be that thing. Even our customers sometimes, they scratch their head.

Oh, you can't ATL capabilities. Yes, we have. Well, that's great, though, because you simplify all the complexity for the customers, and that's what it should be. So they might not know all that. Exactly. Yeah, all that deal behind the same. Bring the capabilities that you need to manage your data in an easy way in order to really

deliver the data to the users. At the end, at the thing that matters is the usage of the data. It's not often the movements, or storage or computing, that happens behind the scenes. Yeah, absolutely. I love the name. Tell us a little bit about the origin of the name, Denoto. Well, it's a Galician word. I really want, you know, to use a Galician name for the company.

There are my roots. Probably was trying, you know, to put some rooting, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the, beginning of the birth of the company. And I was trying to find something that really delivered, you know, a message that could connect, you know, with values, with something that I wanted, you know, for the company when I started this. The novel means this attitude of being fearless towards accomplishing goals, this determination, resilience, to achieve what you try to achieve.

And I like it. It came through brainstorm with a good friend of me, which is a novelist, you know, a writer. He writes fiction, nothing to do with technology. And brainstorming about names and checking, you know, life if the names were available. And we thought, well, wow, this name is fantastic. I love it. Yeah, no, it's great. So I want to shift a little bit into leadership.

You had mentioned that you had a PhD, a full professor, engineering background. How did that help you prepare to be a CEO? Well, it did. I mean, it's not, it was not specifically about, you know, what would be equivalent to an MBA or learning about how to manage people, how to manage an organization or whatever. But I was very fortunate to have very good professors, very good mentors.

The education I got was, it had a very general scope. We touched many things. It was focusing, not, I did, my degree was in telecommunications, but I learned very little about specific, specific telecommunication technologies, signal processing or radar. No, it was a lot about problem solving, the foundation, the physics, the math. Also, they were in the, in the, in the, in the syllabus, a lot significant content,

it was a general content about cognitive sciences or things like that. I think all good universities promote these days, instead of building, curriculum or creating curriculums which are too specific with a general broad a corpse of knowledge that you can use on anything for problem solving. That part is very much on me

the engineering piece as well because I like to build artifacts and I like to build things that work. And when you work with managing a company, that part is also important. It's true that a company is not an artifact, but there's a human component,

there are many things, moving pieces, but the engineering side, I think, helps a little bit. Yeah, I can only imagine. What are two of the best parts of being a CEO? Well, the one I enjoy the most is that you are the driver's seat building value for your customers. creating jobs, creating an economy, creating activity around you, right?

That part, I mean, is very relevant. And in our case has been always an assentant journey, right? You know, that is building community on top of your ideas in a space that didn't exist before? This is probably not that different, you know, like when you do research, you're exploring new territories, right? I think that part is in my DNA for sure. Yeah. What about almost the opposite?

Like, what's one tough challenge, you know, that comes with being a CEO? Challenges, well, there are many challenges, as you can imagine. But if I go with 30,000 feet, and I look at the challenges, the big, big challenges, is about, of course, growing an entity that, you know, sometimes you have an organization with you that is almost perfect. You know, you are enjoying.

You are in a billion-dollar company, and it's one billion and you enjoy. but then of course your board is asking you to you need to grow this you need to be a $2 billion company and then you need to be a $10 billion company and

that stuff and it's not because you're already I could be perfectly happy at some size with the status quo and just continue doing the same thing and enjoy it right but the rules of the game

and you know perfectly you know There's no status quo in business. You need to move on. And the pressure is always to grow and be more profitable and optimize. So don't enjoy too much the present because you need to think about the future. And this is a big challenge. This is a big challenge.

Yeah. And all healthy things grow. So it's good to sort of have that growth mindset and push yourself in the organization and continue to evolve and deliver great services. So I can see that. But yeah, it's definitely a challenge for sure. How do you evolve as a leader? So, you know, obviously your CEO, very successful, professor,

and you have to grow both professionally like we just talked about, but also personally. So are there any things that you do that help you grow as a leader? Always to be in listening mode around you, there are talented people, customers, which are innovating with your technology, I'll tell you something. The roadmap, we're a company with only one product

and only one roadmap. Easily, 50 or 60% of our roadmap comes from customer suggestions. It's not that we are so smart that we know where to go. No, they're telling us. And in order to really grow in that context as a leader, you need to be a good listener. And it's what you try to build around you as well. always listen to know

now now I'm you know I'm getting into you know this age range you know that there's a quite distance you know with a college college freshers that can come out of college

but these guys are very smart I think they are smarter than that we were when we were 20 and they come with a great education you know and it's also about listening to them they may say you know nine out of ten things

which makes no sense at all But there's one, which is, wow, that one is super great. It's an idea to explore. So always be, you know, in that listening mode, trying to learn, you know, from your customers, your wrong employees, new generations, and what other companies know? Yeah. Outside of football and dance, where do you draw inspiration? Well, I use a lot. Football, let's talk the European language here.

Football analogies. Because European football soccer is, well, it's an amazing sport. It's an amazing sport because it's a team effort with a leader, a coach that needs to strategize. And then in time, you mean, you need to execute. There's so many things that I use, you know, to really share a number. thoughts and ideas as an analogies in soccer to our own teams

I don't use that much the dance thing. Nats I think is more individual perhaps is more about you but soccer I use a lot it's a I'm very passionate I really follow

a lot and there's a lot that for his building teams hey, a building teams, champion league teams, is, wow, that's tough. And build teams that are winners all the time. Wow, how will you get there?

That's very, very tough. It's not easy. This is what we try to do also in our company every single day. We're not there yet, but we will be. Yeah. That's good. What's the best advice you ever received? I always, when someone, as a response to that question when someone asked,

I always answer focus, maybe because I was not that kind of guy, you know, as a student, I like everything, it was very diffused, you know, and it was not easy for me to really reject things. narrow with the focus not to be successful to be because when you are in a game that you want to be number one focus is very important you need to measure well what you can what you can hold you know and take in your hands in order to be successful

it is you know it should be about fixing your goals with the right focus planning ahead you know, thinking not just short term, also mid-term, one-term, measure the effort in order to reach the goals and then execute. And I think I learned that very well through my college years. When I started my PhD, I was very much that kind of person. So I was able to focus to reach my goal. It was the end of the line, you know, with the dissertation.

Then I entered my academic career, academic career is like a ladder with steps, not you go. And I was very good at, you know, focusing on what do I need to get to the next layer. And in a company, I think it's very much like that all the time. You know, you need to really set your goals and then, you know, plan accordingly, you know, then focus during the execution, in the plan that you have and execute. Execution is very important. That will be my, and that advice came from my PhD advisor all the time.

Also, there was a person, you know, that he was a full professor in, so already retired, you know, in the university in Barcelona, that he, remember, you know, that even that day, that conversation that we had, you know, that it was all about focus. You won't be successful focus, focus, focus. Yeah, I think that's a great, that's great advice.

It's so easy to lose focus. There are so many things coming at us all the time. And if you don't focus, you don't get your PhD. You don't build a company and deliver for your customer. So this has been super informative on Hill. I really appreciate you being our guests, learning about some new music that we're going to have to look up and add to our Spotify digital voices playlist and then also your life messages.

But just how you started, Denoto, and the things that are important to you and what you're doing in healthcare and other industries. And then we talk a lot about leadership and, you know, being a CEO and it's very insightful. And, of course, you had to talk about football being both Europeans and, you know, leadership and how you evolve. Is there something I missed or we missed that you would like to double down on? I'll give you the last word. No, I think you covered a lot of who I am.

I mean, not really. I mean, very pleased, you know, to be here, you know, with your audience. And I hope that my life story, you know, inspire someone, not to, to, to, whatever, for something positive, of course. Yeah. Absolutely. It will. So thanks again for being our guest and all that you do to help health care organizations do better for their patients in the community. So thank you. And again, thank you everyone for listening to Digital Voices.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.