November 19, 2019
Employee Spotlight: Martin Carrillo
What does the future look like for Marketing events across the globe? How are companies continuing to spread their message and educate others in the wake of COVID-19? In this employee spotlight interview, we introduce you to Carole Gunst, Director of Marketing at AtScale, who shares some of how we are navigating through these unprecedented times, and speaks to what our customers have been able to achieve with AtScale.
What is your role at AtScale?
A: I’m Director of Marketing at AtScale. I work with AtScale’s partners, customers, our product management team, our sales team and I also work with press and analysts who are interested in AtScale.
How long have you been at the company for?
A: Just over a year.
What does a typical “day in the life” look like for you? Since the pandemic began, what is different about your day-to-day?
A: I don’t think there’s ever a typical day at AtScale. Every day is different, depending on what’s going on at the time. Some days I’m working closely with our product management team on a product launch. Some days I’m working with our customers to help them tell the story about what they’re doing with AtScale software so that they can be more successful in their business. Other days I’m on Zoom calls with the rest of the marketing team, working on a program or another project we’re doing. Every day is different.
One of the great things about working at AtScale is, for the first time in a long time, I have a job where the office is a 15 minute walk from my house. I love both living in Boston and working in Boston. However, since the middle of March when COVID-19 became our reality, I both live and work out of my apartment, which is a bit different for me. The Zoom calls haven’t changed, and what I do hasn’t changed, but I do miss bouncing ideas off of my co-workers in the office. For example, it’s great to have our Sales team right there in the office when I’m working on a case study with a customer because I can ask them questions that come up while I’m writing. I know that I can always find people through Slack, email, or a phone call, but it’s not the same when you’re all in the office together.. Luckily, I was able to be in our Boston office for six months before everyone started working from home.
COVID-19 has significantly changed the way companies operate and the ways people gather. What do you think the future looks like for marketing events?
A: I think for this year, events have definitely gone virtual for us and our partners. We’ve known that webinars work, but we have to be careful to avoid webinar fatigue. When you’re running a webinar, you have to make sure that you’re offering value to your audience, by teaching new things and being respectful of the time that they are investing in us.
Here’s an example of a partner program that I’m currently working on which is the AtScale “booth” to the Tableau Conference-ish. Tableau has reimagined their annual conference as a virtual event. And, It’s pretty cool. AtScale has our own “booth”, our chat room for live chats, and will be running live demos through Zoom in our booth.
Because the event is online, it is being run around the world. There are different times where it’s available in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific; which is a good thing because we are going to be able to get our message out to a lot more people, who can watch from their offices, or people who would not have been able to travel to the conference otherwise, will be able to attend. Last year, we had 20,000 people at the Las Vegas Tableau Conference, whereas this year there are 50,000 people projected to attend because they can do so online.
With that said, I do hope that during 2021, we can get back together in person again. I miss seeing my peers in person at shows, but I think we are all making the best of it. Since this is working now, we may find it works better in some ways.
What makes AtScale and our solution unique?
A: AtScale offers a way for our customers to query their data faster on the Cloud. We have been able to demonstrate through our benchmark reports that Dave Mariani and team have run, that we are not only faster, but we are able to save our customers a lot of money in compute costs when they’re using AtScale.
For example, bol.com, one of Europe’s biggest online retailers, told us that AtScale is able to run data queries efficiently which is helping them save on compute costs. And, Rakuten Rewards told us that adopting Snowflake was the easiest part of their cloud transformation thanks to AtScale. We also worked with Boston Children’s Hospital, who’s using AtScale to do help with www.covidnearyou.org, which is as a way to crowdsource self-reported COVID-19 symptom data so that public health officials can derive insights about the spread of the disease across North America. AtScale has really been able to help a lot of businesses and see significant advantages when using our technology.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
A: The most challenging part of my job is managing and prioritizing the things that need to get done. Since COVID-19 hit, our marketing team, which is small, but mighty, meets almost every morning at 9:30 on a Zoom call to check in and talk about what we’re working on, which helps us stay prioritized and make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.
If I’m honest, I believe that rolling priorities are a major challenge in tech regardless; there’s always things that come up that you have to jump on, and make sure you’re prioritizing everything correctly, so that major things don’t fall off the plate.
The most rewarding?
A: For me, the most rewarding thing is working with our customers and talking to them about the success they are having with AtScale and the impact that it’s having on their business. For example, the case study we’re working on with Keurig Dr. Pepper; after Keurig Green Mountain and Dr. Pepper merged, they found they had data that was siloed across different parts of the organization, and they needed a way to get one view of all their data for both the coffee side, as well as the cold drink side of their business, so they had that for forecasting, sales, and inventory planning.
AtScale was a perfect solution for them to be able to get that insight through our Universal Semantic Layer™, as well as help business users and data scientists alike analyze their data, using Microsoft Excel and other tools. We were a major help for them to be able to do that. It’s great to always talk to customers and find out how AtScale is helping them make a difference in their business.
Describe AtScale in three words.
A: Challenging, interesting, and rewarding. If I could add a fourth word, fun!
When you’re not working, where are people most likely to find you?
A: Since the gym is closed, I can be found walking around Boston trying to get all of my Fitbit steps in these days. If I’m not home in front of my laptop, I’m usually out taking a walk somewhere around the Common in Boston, the Public Garden, or over by the Esplanade. One place you won’t catch me at Logan Airport since I’m not currently doing any of the business travel that I used to do.
Thank you, Carole! Interested in meeting the rest of the team? Keep an eye out for our next employee spotlight, here on our blog.
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