What if the biggest bottleneck in your data strategy isn’t your infrastructure—but your architecture?
That’s the bold idea behind Osama Elkady’s approach to modern data platforms, shared in his in-depth conversation on the Ignite Podcast. As the co-founder and CEO of Incorta, Osama is pioneering a radically simplified way for enterprises to access, query, and act on data—without traditional ETL pipelines.
Before founding Incorta, Osama spent nearly 20 years at Oracle, where he led innovations in business intelligence and enterprise reporting and invented XML Publisher, a core reporting engine still used today. But even with those successes, he saw firsthand how traditional data processes fail to meet the real-time needs of modern enterprises.
From Oracle to Incorta: The Making of a Disruptor
Osama’s journey began with a three-month Oracle contract that turned into two decades of innovation. He quickly rose through the ranks, leading products that transformed how enterprises viewed reporting and data architecture.
Eventually, though, he hit a wall. “You come to a point where your pace of innovation outgrows the company,” Osama explained. His idea to build Oracle’s first non-Oracle-compatible product nearly got him fired—but it also revealed a bigger opportunity. That spark led to the founding of Incorta—a data platform built to eliminate ETL and deliver real-time access to all enterprise data.
The ETL Problem—and Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping Solution
In most enterprises, accessing data still means enduring a months-long journey: build a data warehouse, set up complex ETL pipelines, and hope reports are usable by the time they're ready. But by then, data is stale—and often wrong.
Incorta changes everything.
Using a breakthrough technique called Direct Data Mapping, Incorta connects directly to systems of record and makes the entire dataset queryable—instantly and in its original form.
“ETL is just a workaround,” Osama said. “We built a new engine specifically for querying—not storing—enterprise data.”
Real-Time Insights at Enterprise Scale
Incorta’s impact is visible across major global enterprises:
Starbucks eliminated 10 data systems and reduced data refresh times from 24 hours to just 10 minutes during financial close.
Broadcom, with 17,000 users and 26 business units, runs 450,000 reports per day—most completing in under half a second.
Hormel Foods switched from a stalled two-year Oracle data warehouse project to a working Incorta-to-BigQuery pipeline in just 2.5 months.
These use cases demonstrate what happens when business users no longer wait for data teams to “prep” the data—they simply query it, live.
Built for the Cloud, Designed for Scale
Incorta leverages the full power of the modern cloud. It uses:
Open-standard columnar formats (like Parquet) to ensure transparency and interoperability
In-memory processing and smart compression to enable sub-second response times
Cloud-native orchestration to instantly scale across hundreds or thousands of machines on demand
With Incorta, companies don’t have to define schemas or ETL pipelines in advance. Instead, they bring in complete source data and empower teams to explore and analyze it on the fly.
Culture of Innovation: “Think More, Code Less”
Incorta’s engineering culture mirrors its product philosophy: simple, powerful, elegant.
“The best developer is the one who writes no code,” Osama says.
He invests heavily in interns and young engineers—giving them the toughest unsolved problems, not menial tasks. It’s this high-trust, high-autonomy culture that fuels continuous innovation and speed.
The Road Ahead: Lakehouses, Unified Data, and Limitless Potential
Osama sees the industry moving away from data warehouses toward lakehouse architectures, where all data—structured, unstructured, streaming, and file-based—can be queried and processed in real time.
Incorta is leading that charge by treating everything from ERP tables to PDFs and audio as equally accessible. No more siloed systems. No more multi-week report generation. Just real-time decision-making at enterprise scale.
“We build what our customers don’t even know is possible—until they see it,” Osama says.
Final Thought: Innovation Without Limits
Incorta’s story isn’t just about faster reports or cheaper storage. It’s about redefining what’s possible with enterprise data. Osama’s core belief is simple: “Innovation has no limits—unless we accept them.”
With Direct Data Mapping, a cloud-native architecture, and a rapidly growing base of global enterprise customers, Incorta isn’t just helping companies move faster. It’s helping them think differently about what data can do.
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Chapters:
00:01 Osama’s journey from Egypt to Oracle
02:30 Inventing XML Publisher and shaping Oracle’s BI tools
04:45 Why he left Oracle to build Incorta
07:30 The broken state of enterprise data and reliance on Excel
09:30 What is Direct Data Mapping—and why it matters
12:00 Why traditional ETL doesn’t scale in modern systems
14:45 How Incorta enables real-time data access from complex systems
17:30 ETL vs. ELT vs. Incorta’s streamlined approach
20:00 Real-world use cases: Starbucks, Broadcom, and Hormel
25:00 Technical challenges in building a new kind of engine
27:30 Why cloud storage was the unlock for Incorta’s model
30:45 Open standards vs. open source in enterprise data
32:00 Key inflection point: launching Incorta’s cloud-native platform
33:45 GTM strategy—selling outcomes, not tech
36:00 Culture of simplicity: “Think more, code less”
40:10 Building talent pipelines through high-leverage internships
42:30 Leadership lessons on trust, retention, and team dynamics
45:00 The future of data architecture and the rise of lakehouses
50:03 Wrap-up and Osama’s vision for innovation without limits
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