I am super excited to announce our first Meetup of 2020 at Nomura. We welcome Robb Keayes, Senior Software Developer at Nomura, as our guest speaker. Robb will be presenting on how Nomura uses Elastic to help track their DevOps transformation in his talk titled 'Transformation Observability through Metrics'.

From the Elastic side, we welcome Renee Jacobs, Solutions Architect at Elastic. Renee will be presenting on Kibana Lens: https://www.elastic.co/what-is/kibana-lens.

Talk 1: Transformation Observability through Metrics

Speaker: Robb Keayes

Speaker Bio: Robb Keayes is Vice President and Senior Software Developer at Nomura America Services, LLC. He has worked for almost 2 years as a DevOps Coach, helping drive Nomura’s DevOps Transformation by working with teams to develop Agile skills and improve their development processes. Prior to Robb’s current role, he led UX development of Nomura’s primary global fixed-income trading platform. Robb joined Nomura in 2011 and is based in New York. Before joining Nomura, he worked at Morgan Stanley in New York and Japan, and as a Software Architect at Nikon Corp, in Tokyo, Japan. Robb holds a B.Sc. (Hon) from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Talk Description: Digital Transformation is more important than ever, but as we know, many well-intentioned Transformations fail. They fail for many reasons – related to corporate leadership, vision, communication, employee buy-in, entrenched corporate culture, and a myriad of others. The problem underlying them all is often a lack of Observability. Without Observability, we cannot answer fundamental questions: (a) Is the transformation achieving its goals? (b) What is working, and what is not? (c) Is the information readily available to those who need it, when they need it? Without answers to these questions, success remains elusive. 

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Talk 2: Kibana Lens

Speaker: Renee Jacobs, Elastic Solutions Architect

Talk Description: This talk will focus on our newest Kibana feature: Kibana Lens. Lens was released in 7.5 and is a significant step forward in making data visualization and exploration with the Elastic Stack even easier and more intuitive. Lens is focused on ease of use, visualization best practices, and flexibility. You can build a visualization simply by dragging and dropping a data field into a window, and the smart suggestions built into Lens provide you with new ways of visualizing your data — all while giving you the flexibility to change your mind and quickly switch between chart types and index patterns. With Lens, slicing and dicing through data in Kibana has never been simpler or more fun.