I’m gratified to lead a startup providing an impactful software solution to industrial companies. I’m even more gratified when that solution gets noticed and oure company gains momentum.

The most recent evidence of Element’s momentum -- scaling to reach more companies with our solution --  is the hiring of our first EVP Sales. The indicators of our ramp can be found beyond that, however.

The news: we’ve hired Stephen Walsh as our first Executive Vice President of Sales.

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Enrique is a software engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Element he created a product at Careflow Solutions based on his work with health care standards for care planning and coordination of care. He holds a BS in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Q: As a former entrepreneur, what skills were transferable from starting your own business to working at Element?

A: I had the opportunity to work with multiple health care clients from the early stages of an idea to building and delivering working products. I was lucky to connect with teams who valued user experience design and lean execution. That experience aligns great with the strong customer focus and agile execution of the Element teams.

My role was a mix of consultant and engineer. I worked with users from the early requirements phase, worked on architecture, design and developed the product (both backend and front-end) as a member of my client’s IT teams. I also developed my own product; so for the last couple of years, I've been operating in startup mode.

Q: Tell us a bit more about what you do on a day to day basis here at Element.

A: I build backend software for integrating information from the industrial internet of things (IIoT). I get to do functional programming in Scala, my favorite programming language. I am excited to be contributing to bringing together the diversity of industrial assets and high volume time series data to enable our digital twin platform for industrial transformation.

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Industrial companies are becoming increasingly seasoned and sophisticated in their exploration of data analytics. They’re aware of – and intrigued by – the promise of analytics but are increasingly focusing on getting down to business, encountering challenges and asking tough questions.

This means confronting cultural barriers (i.e. “this is how it’s always been done”) and working to ensure the broad availability of data and analytics (versus making them available only to an organization’s most motivated groups). They’re also moving away from addressing narrow challenges with data and instead treating data as a powerful, broadly applicable and dynamic asset. To first-movers in the industrial sector, data is an asset on par with capital, equipment or personnel.

These are some of the findings from Element Analytics’ workshop, “Digital Transformation Readiness” at the recent OSIsoft PI World.

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If you’re reading this, you know that one of the industrial sector’s current Holy Grails is data analysis. Industrial IoT generates huge amounts of operations data and so, the thinking goes, companies should move quickly to analyze that data. This, in turn, should pave the way to enhanced operational efficiency, smarter use of equipment, smaller environmental impacts, better worker safety and, of course, higher profits. Simple, right? Amazon, Google and Facebook profit mightily from sophisticated data analysis – so why not oil and gas, manufacturing and utility companies?

But if you’re reading this, you also know that processing, managing and integrating data from sensors, engineering systems, and transactional systems is really hard. The job generally requires deploying a battalion of people armed with spreadsheets. In the current era of algorithms and automation, managing industrial data is embarrassingly last-century.

Knowing this, it’s fair to ask if reality will ever catch up to the hype of industrial data analysis. Specifically, will a method emerge to efficiently manage and integrate industrial data so that sophisticated analytics can be performed?

We feel that Gartner, the world’s leading IT analyst firm, is increasingly focused on this question. We think that fact alone should tell you that something is up.

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Many people say that product management is the “it” role in Silicon Valley. I don’t necessarily disagree; after all, many of my peers going into tech companies were adamant about becoming product managers before they realized the scarcity of the role. Despite the plethora of “What is Product Management” articles floating around the internet, it remains a nebulous career owing to both its apparent scarcity and because its responsibilities are so uniquely tied to people and product. With all that being said, I feel beyond fortunate to have experienced my first taste of product management at Element Analytics.

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