Expert Panel: Best Practices for Modernizing Your Data Environment
Webinar Speaker: Donald Farmer, TDWI Research Fellow
Date: Monday, August 24, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
Enterprises are moving rapidly to modernize data environments to meet the demands of AI, democratized analytics, and deployment of analytics-rich applications that depend on continuous and accelerated data flows. Opportunities to drive higher value from all types of data can be squandered when outmoded practices and legacy data platforms, integration, quality processes, and management and governance tools do not measure up to current and evolving demands.
Discussion in this Expert Panel will focus on what modernization means today: the architectural and operational transformations required to optimize agility, scalability, and governance in data environments. Through case examples, experts will discuss how to align modernization efforts with strategic business goals—addressing not just technology refresh but process, culture, and ecosystem evolution.
Topics include:
- The value of emerging design patterns, including data mesh, data fabric, and modular data services that promote flexibility without fragmentation
- How automation, metadata management, semantic layers, and observability can help transform your data environment to be AI-ready
- Cloud migration best practices for successful modernization, resilience, and faster innovation
Guest Speakers
Eric Carr
Lead Partner Sales Engineer
Fivetran
Eric Carr is a partner sales engineer at Fivetran, where he leads technical enablement across the company's GSI and reseller alliances—including Capgemini, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and Accenture. Previously at Google and Looker, he holds a master's in data science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now focuses on helping partners move past certification and pilots to production data and AI delivery, using the Fivetran + dbt Open Data Infrastructure stack. He's based in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Sriraj Rajaram
Director of Product Management
Reltio
Sriraj Rajaram is the director of product management at Reltio with over 20 years of expertise developing solutions and advising customers in the areas of master data management, Customer 360, data integration, and data governance. He has authored several white papers on data management practices and is a well-known speaker at industry conferences. He is passionate about advancing the role of data governance in the build out of AI capabilities and language models.