Technology Partnerships are the Heartbeat of Kubrick
Since day zero, Kubrick’s mission has been to help solve the digital skills emergency.
First founded in 2016, the company has trained and deployed thousands of consultants in the UK and the US. What has made the company successful is its ability to solve business problems, working across a range of next-generation technologies.
Lawrence Freeman, Director of Next-Generation Tech at Kubrick, works closely with company clients and technology partners to understand current market trends. From this, his teams determine how technology can enable Kubrick consultants to address the needs of its clients.
“We have built and worked with thousands of consultants, helping to build their careers. It’s been a really satisfying and rewarding experience,” Lawrence says. “The role that data plays creates a holistic picture of what we are seeing now, solving business problems with technology, data, cloud and AI – whilst underpinning security best practices.”
Confronting data-driven challenges
Kubrick’s focus has always been on data, cloud and AI. These pillars of technical expertise have allowed the company to carve a niche in understanding real data business needs.
“Via market intelligence, we understood where the real need was,” Lawrence explains. “Data engineering has always been our most in demand practice, so we’ve trained more data engineers than any other practice.”
He adds: “We’re helping organisations with satisfying the skill they need in data engineering, but layering governance on top of that. There’s no point engineering data if it is poorly governed, so we worked our way down the foundations and now have great relationships with our clients and tech partners.
“The need is data governance. It underpins everything – businesses can’t transform and can’t embrace technology if they don’t address the foundations. You can’t just throw numbers at it. You’ve got to throw skills at it and work with the right tech partners.”
Part of this strategy inevitably involves AI, which has led to significant challenges impacting businesses seeking to digitally transform. In order to remain competitive, organisations are finding that AI offers them a strategic advantage.
As enterprises around the world scrabble to harness the technology, they are becoming aware that their data governance processes are insufficient or out-of-date. Lawrence explains that a company will not have good-quality AI if they have poor-quality data.
“AI governance is equally important,” he says. “You can’t move forward with AI if you’re not going to be compliant, so governance is key.”
Lawrence also indicates that the global workforce is having to shift in order to make space for AI technologies.
“When generative AI (Gen AI) made its big appearance, everyone was saying that AI is going to augment people’s roles, it’s not going to replace the workforce. But actually, what we’ve seen over the last 12 months is that the biggest use case of AI has been for automating repetitive tasks, and so of course that is going to replace some roles.”
Powering digital transformation with emerging tech
As far as Kubrick is concerned, digital transformation is the path forward to helping its partner organisations drive innovation forward. Its digital transformation business model considers emerging technologies that could transform operations for its clients.
“All technology moves across a hype cycle. We look for partners who are doing great things with technology and can help us get the best out of technology,” Lawrence comments. “We have nurtured this area of the data market by adding in AI governance and Gen AI and leveraging our history in data governance.”
Having been around for almost a decade, Kubrick has been at the precipice of next-gen technology transformations. The company has helped organisations move from their on-premise infrastructure and data centres, all the way through to the cloud.
Lawrence explains that these modern data platforms are enabling AI, highlighting that: “If you want to embrace AI, you’ve got to get your data on the cloud.
“At Kubrick, we focus on those data warehouse cloud migrations and we’ve done that time and time again with a number of partners and clients. Next gen tech has just such broad applicability and utility that we are always ensuring that we’re placed across the areas that have that demand.”
Additionally, the company has worked across key industries such as creating predictive maintenance patterns and digital twin technology in aviation, and harnessing graph technology and other emerging technologies to power ahead drug discovery in the pharmaceutical sector.
Holding a presence across myriad industries enables Kubrick to work across many different technologies and better help clients solve their business problems. As a result of its diversity, the company has evolved across spaces such as healthcare and finance – in addition to other industries – to have significant impact.
Establishing a strong partner base
In order to meet such high demands, Kubrick is heavily committed to its workforce. The company has created a culture where its consultants can continually refresh their skills and work with technology partners to gain high-level accreditations.
“It’s not just great for their careers, it’s great for our clients because they’re getting people who are exposed to real projects, but also they can evidence it through those accreditations that our partners are offering,” Lawrence notes.
“We feel it’s really important, especially in this fast evolving world with AI that’s been suddenly thrust upon everyone.”
Lawrence explains that the company is able to excel in this by diversifying its talent pool. Instead of hiring STEM graduates exclusively, the company hires consultants from a range of backgrounds to provide its clients with diverse talent.
“That’s what Kubrick is really all about: Building diverse teams to solve business problems and allowing clients to retain talent.”
What sets Kubrick apart is its commitment to diversity. The company strategically looks for talent from diverse sources, hiring 1-2% of the 600 applications a week for consulting roles.
“What we build on top of that is an incredible training programme over a four month period, delivered by industry experts,” Lawrence says. “We have a world-class training programme, in addition to the clients and the tech partners that we work with. That provides an excellent career opportunity for our consultants as they work with technology that wouldn’t normally be so accessible for them early on in their careers.”
Kubrick’s technology partners help the company better serve its client base, as it works with world-leading data, AI and cloud software partners. As an ambitious company, it works with hyperscalers like GCP, AWS and Microsoft, in addition to other smaller platforms spanning across data and AI.
“Essentially, our approach is to make sure that we partner with the right software providers that align not just to our practice strategy, in terms of how we are building our own workforce, but also ensuring that we are listening to clients,” explains Jo Bottino Jones, Kubrick’s UK Head of Channel Alliance. “Our next-gen tech approach bakes in the right software and the right partners that will help us deliver the right solutions and value for clients.
“Our partners are hugely important, to the point where they are a cornerstone of our go-to-market.”
When it comes to forming a partnership, Kubrick makes a number of considerations. These address alignment with company strategy, platform offerings and culture and values.
“Our values are hugely important to us – we want to make sure that we can align and work well to deliver those solutions,” Jo adds. “From that partnership approach, we can really deliver better solutions collaboratively and do it in a very cost-effective, beneficial way with really favourable business-generated outcomes.”
Snowflake: Leveraging AI to digitally transform
A crucial partner for Kubrick is Snowflake, a world-leading cloud computing company that enables Kubrick to leverage its latest innovations in data and AI. Both companies have held a successful partnership for more than two years, with Kubrick now being one of Snowflake’s managed select partners.
“We work very collaboratively with their partner team and their wider client team to align on accounts to ensure joint outcomes,” Jo explains.
Snowflake’s latest offering ensures its entire platform is within AI, which aligns successfully with Kubrick’s digital strategy. As Jo highlights, it enables Kubrick to deliver data engineering with the latest techniques that Snowflake has to offer.
“Their product roadmap is baked into how we can work to best deliver solutions to clients,” she says. “A really good example is a major player in the global aviation industry. We were part of a team that were asked to deliver a cloud migration of silo data sets and an on-prem warehouse. We worked very collaboratively from the outset with Snowflake to identify the problems and from the outset it was very clear that several of their systems were both on-prem and on cloud. There was a lack of integration and so they had an overly complicated data sharing process.
“We were able to look at that as a particular solution that we could deliver to prove the value of the Snowflake platform. The joint client then decided to create one cloud-based platform, which created very efficient processes that could be reported on in a quicker, more cost-effective way.”
Moving forward, Kubrick is ready to confront its AI responsibilities, ranging across data, cloud and cybersecurity, whilst maintaining that partner-led focus. As the global cyber threat landscape continues to intensify, alongside a period of mass enterprise AI innovation, compliance will be necessary in protecting business data from critical threats.
“We need to make sure AI models are transparent and explainable,” Lawrence explains. “Cyberattacks are a constant threat that uses data, so everyone needs to up their game in cybersecurity maturity.
“That’s where Kubrick is also ensuring that we have the right partners. It is partners like Snowflake that will enable organisations to be prepared for combating any threat that comes their way.”
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