Andrew Brust, the principal of Blue Badge Insights, is a veteran and market intelligence expert in the database and BI/analytics field, having worked as a practitioner since the late 1980s, a consulting executive through the 1990s and 2000s, and a journalist and analyst in the Big Data/BI world (for ZDNet since 2011 and GigaOm since 2013). Brust has worked on the vendor side as well, as Senior Director, Market Strategy and Intelligence, at Datameer – a Big Data ISV – from early 2015 to August, 2017. Brust has an excellent sense of customer needs and pain points in the data analytics, BI and data warehouse space, having been involved in the business intelligence market for over 20 years. He is also a cloud analytics expert: his recognition as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and RD has provided him many years of insight and expertise with data services on the Azure cloud, including early beta testing of what is now Azure HDInsight and early involvement with what became Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics. He has experience on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) side as well, having authored two Pluralsight courses on that cloud’s Big Data stack. Brust is a skilled writer, and has written for technical audiences for 25 years. Brust also presents on topics like Databricks, HDInsight, SQL Server and Power BI at technology conferences including Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live! and Artificial Intelligence Live!, all of which he co-chairs. In May 2019, Brust co-presented a breakout session with a member of the Azure Synapse Analytics team at Microsoft’s Build developer conference. He also presented on data governance and data catalogs at the prestigious Strata Data conference in New York, in both 2018 and 2019. Brust’s technical background, industry knowledge, and his prolific work as an author and presenter combine to make him a versatile strategist, advisor, industry analyst and “connector” to vendors, experts and resources in the analytics and data science worlds.