I started the Drill to Detail Podcast series back in October this year with an inaugural episode featuring long-time friend and colleague Stewart Bryson talking about changes in the BI industry, and since then we’ve gone on to publish one episode a week featuring guests such as Oracle’s Paul Sonderegger on data capital, Cloudera’s Mike Percy on Apache Kudu followed shortly after by Mark Grover on Apache Spark, Dan McClary from Google talking about SQL-on-Hadoop and Neeraja Rentachintala from MapR telling us about Apache Drill and Apache Arrow, Tanel Poder from Gluent on the New World of Hybrid Data …

… along with many other guests including Jen Underwood, Kent Graziano, Pat Patterson from StreamSets and old friends and colleagues Andrew Bond, Graham Spicer and most recently for the Christmas and New Year special, Robin Moffatt.

In fact I’d only ever planned on publishing new episodes of Drill to Detail once every two weeks along the lines of the two podcasts that inspired Drill to Detail, the Apple-focused The Talk Show by John Gruber and Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa’s Accidental Tech Podcast), but what with a number of episodes recorded over the summer waiting for the October launch and so many great guests coming on over the new few months we ended-up publishing new episodes every week.

So at the end of 2016 and with fourteen episodes published on this website and on the iTunes directory I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the guests that came on the show along with friends in the industry such as Confluent’s Gwen Shapira who helped get the word out and make introductions, and of course most importantly I’d like to thank everyone who’s downloaded episodes of the show, mentioned it on Twitter and other social networks and increasingly, subscribed to the show on the iTunes store to the point where we’re typically hitting a thousand or more subscribers each week based on Squarespace’s estimate of overall RSS subscriber numbers including those coming in from iTunes and other feed aggregators.

And if you’re wondering which show had the highest audience numbers it was November’s Episode 7 with Cloudera’s Mark Grover on Apache Spark and Hadoop Application Architectures, closely followed by October’s episode with Oracle’s Big Data Strategist Paul Sonderegger on data capital, both of which were great examples of what ended-up being the recurring theme and area of discussion with every one of the guests and shows we recorded … the business, strategy, rationale and opportunities for competitive advantage coming out of innovations in the big data and analytics industry.

And now we’re going into 2017 and the second year of Drill to Detail, we’re going to double-down on this area of focus by updating the Drill to Detail website with a new look and launching the new Drill to Detail Blog to accompany the podcast series, each week posting a long-form blog post looking at the business and strategy behind what’s happening in the big data, analytics and cloud-based data processing industry.

We’ll still be continuing with the podcast series exactly as they are now with guests including Elastic’s Mark Walkom and Cindi Howson from Gartner due on the show in January, but these longer-form blog posts give us a chance to explore and explain in a more structured way the topics and questions raised by what’s been discussed on the podcast, analyzing and exploring the implications from trends and directions coming out of the industry.

Finally, going back to my original inspiration for the podcast that started all of this, a big part of the inspiration and idea to focus on this particular theme came from what’s now become my new favourite blog and podcast series, Ben Thompson’s Stratechery website and Exponent podcast that he co-authors with James Allworth, and if I manage to get even someway towards the insights and understanding he brings towards the wider IT landscape and apply that to the part of the industry we work in during the coming year … well that’ll be my evenings, commute time and weekend time well spent this coming year.