My Journey to Free Data at DevOps Speed

By Brian Brewer | Published July 25, 2024, 09:00 AM EDT

As of 08:34 PM EDT on Thursday, July 24, 2024, I look back on a career that’s defined both my journey and InfoLibrarian™’s evolution. For over two decades, I consulted with SMBs and enterprises, driving principal architecture and CTO-level strategies through consulting firms and direct hands-on client engagements. I led the charge on successes you’ll find in our Customer Success Stories—from streamlining metadata for a global bank to modernizing data governance for a healthcare leader. Yet, by 2020, my own company faced a paradox: our pioneering Metadata Appliance™ from 2005 had become a legacy trap. This is the story of how my experience fueled a pivot away from enterprise software to focus on modernization consulting—and the lessons learned.

The Legacy Bind

Our early success hinged on legacy platforms, data warehouses, and static catalogs—paradigms I helped implement for clients. By 2020, InfoLibrarian™’s platform, built on pre-cloud tech, struggled under the weight of technical debt. Maintenance costs soared, and an outage—rooted in an outdated adapter—shook client trust. Having guided countless customers through similar challenges, I recognized the signs: rigid warehouses too slow for DevOps, catalogs too brittle for real-time events, and platforms too locked-in for cloud-native agility. This pain was widespread, with 70% of CTOs seeing tech debt as their top innovation barrier. We were no exception.

The Pivot Driven by Experience

That crisis was my call to action. Drawing on years of consulting—leading SMBs to scale metadata systems and enterprises to overhaul architectures—I steered InfoLibrarian™ toward a strategic pivot in 2020. We shifted from a product focus to a consulting-led model, birthing the InfoLibrarian™ Modernization Framework. My hands-on work with clients, from Fortune 100s to nimble startups, shaped this transformation:

  • Breaking the Warehouse Mold: We replaced batch processes with streaming architectures, slashing latency by over 60%.
  • Revolutionizing Catalogs: Static catalogs evolved into event-driven metadata governance, enabling instant data flows.
  • Embracing Open Cloud Solutions: Leveraging open-source and multi-cloud strategies, we cut vendor dependency by 70%.

As the principal architect and CTO, I embedded fractional consulting expertise—honed through years of client successes—to align strategy with execution. By 2020, the pivot was complete, and our consulting engagements helped clients thrive with AI-ready, DevOps-speed data systems.

By 2020, InfoLibrarian™ was no longer active as a software platform. From that point forward, InfoLibrarian became part of my professional portfolio—capturing the lessons, frameworks, and outcomes from two decades of metadata and modernization work.

Data at DevOps Speed: A New Era

Data is no longer a static relic—it’s a live, event-driven stream. My journey, from consulting firms to leading InfoLibrarian™’s pivot, proved that escaping legacy paradigms unlocks this potential. The framework we developed enables enterprises to move data as fast as code, free from the constraints of traditional warehouses and catalogs, powered by cloud-native openness.

Your Path to Freedom

If your data is shackled by legacy systems, the lessons from this transformation offer a proven path. My experience—guiding clients through modernization and completing InfoLibrarian™’s transformation—provides insights into breaking free and unleashing data at DevOps speed.

About the Author

Brian Brewer, former CTO of InfoLibrarian™, brings over 20 years of consulting experience, having led SMBs and enterprises to architectural success. His Metadata Value Method™ emerged from this journey, now documented as part of the company’s modernization framework. Learn more about my journey in my story or our history on the company page to see how this transformation began.