London Stock Exchange

I am David Thomas. I'm the CDO of the London Stock Exchange Group. When I joined London Stock Exchange Group, I was the first CDO.

What I found was a fantastic team with a lot of fantastic data products, but realistically hadn't put in place the structure and the discipline that many people would assume would be in place. What we've done over the last four and a half years, we've embedded a strategy that we hope will address some of the immediate challenges that we face, but also is forward facing. As a CDO, when you are putting in place a data strategy, you first put in place a strategy, and then clearly your next steps to look for a tooling strategy that supports that.

And we always look for the best in breed across the tools that we need, be that data quality, cataloging, data governance, tooling. I was introduced to Actian at Big Data. What's immediately apparent, both through meeting the Actian team and but also meeting existing consumers of Actian, is that that truly is a partnership.

Their relationships and existing partnerships across multiple industry vectors. That demonstrates the ability to innovate and also indicates a willingness to learn. That innovation, and especially as we move into a period of AI, demonstrates the ability of an organization to move with the times.

The critical component is being able to balance the disciplines of data governance and data quality, and lineage, et cetera. All of these key things, Actian, they're an organization that is clearly looking to build relationships with partners. They're innovating, which gives me confidence that they're going to do so moving forward.