Yellowbrick road to a new land

Next week, we're starting something new and will be sharing it here.

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." - Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, 1939.

We've been hopping down the Yellowbrick Road since 2014, and clearly Toto in this particular case is the dog, not the IoT toilet seat. Yellowbrick the company and product are rooted in on-premises enterprise data warehousing technology that grew like a rocket until Covid-19 literally went viral and slowed the business down. Cloud adoption accelerated, we extended Yellowbrick to the public cloud and won more big customers, but never achieved the visibility and market presence of Databricks or Snowflake. We were too late to hit the big time.

If Yellowbrick was your partner, you'd introduce it to your parents but you wouldn't go clubbing with it or post hot influencer pics with it: It's a stable, mature, middle-aged, profitable business, a reliable powerhouse running large global customers from the US to the UK, Australia and Greater China. It's still a great upgrade for ditching legacy Teradata, IBM or RedShift for something simpler and faster from a company that actually cares about its customers and improves the base product – but it's not where most people's data roadmaps are taking them now.

We never wanted to found a profitable medium-sized business, we wanted to change the world of data and do something big; make a dent, leave a lasting impact. We want a hot company with influence. So we've spent a great deal of time brainstorming in the pub with enterprise data teams questioning everything, working on something brand new and more relevant to future of data and AI, and we're launching it soon.

It's called Floe, and it's where the Lakehouse and AI meet the data warehouse. A "floe" is a sheet of ice made from frozen seawater that floats around, thinner and more lightweight than an Iceberg. We've got a new company, FloeDB, working on the technology. The stack is all new, most definitely not AI lipstick on Yellowbrick. Yellowbrick keeps winning new customers and delighting existing ones, running critical business analytics and data warehousing, as always. Floe does something different.

Floe's is solving data problems in and around lakehouse architecture that people don't even know they have yet, while still remaining true to our SQL analytics roots. Problems like how to enable ad-hoc exploratory queries against silver data, minimise data engineering bottlenecks, protect data from rogue AI agents and protect businesses from vibe-coded SQL.

We're going to be talking about this stuff next week, as well as what we're building and the hurdles we're overcoming, in the data & AI community at local events, conferences and online.

This article was written by me, not by GPT. Do follow Floe on LinkedIn here, our company blog here, or my personal blog here.