Fresha Data Meetup: Data Rocks, Latency Drops

Join us on March 10th from 6:00pm for a Data Streaming meetup hosted by Fresha!

Venue:
Fresha
The Tower, 207 Old Street
London, EC1V 9NR
7th Floor

PLEASE bring your PHOTO ID and REGISTER with your First and Last Name. Thanks!

DOORS CLOSE AT 7PM FOR SECURITY.

Agenda:

• 6:00pm – 6:30pm: Food/Drinks and Networking
• 6:30pm - 7:00pm: Jesús Gómez-Escalonilla Guijarro, Data Engineer @ Fresha
• 7:00pm - 7:30pm: Pranam Codur, Senior Solutions Engineer @ Confluent
• 7:30pm - 8:00pm: Sreeram Machavaram C, Principal Architect @ Cognizant
• 8:00pm - 9:00pm: Q&A Networking

Speaker One:
Jesús Gómez-Escalonilla Guijarro, Data Engineer @ Fresha

Title of Talk:
Optimizing StarRocks Query Performance: Lost in JSON, Found by Northstar

Abstract:
StarRocks is fast, but understanding slow queries at scale is hard when plans are massive JSON. We built Northstar at Fresha to turn plans and execution metrics into a visual view you can reason about quickly. Through production case studies that reflect our real workloads, we'll show the bottlenecks Northstar exposed (scans, joins, skew, modelling) and how it made tuning faster and more systematic.

Bio:
Jesús Gómez-Escalonilla Guijarro is a Data Engineer at Fresha, where he focuses on building scalable and performant analytical data systems. He has been part of Fresha’s data team for several years, first as an Analytics Engineer and now in his current role, helping shape how data is modelled, analysed, and optimised across the organisation. Passionate about making complex systems understandable and efficient, Jesús enjoys tackling performance bottlenecks and sharing learnings with the wider data engineering community.

Speaker Two:
Pranam Codur, Senior Solutions Engineer @ Confluent

Title of Talk:
From Data Mess to Data Streaming Platform

Abstract:
Most organizations want realtime data but are held back by brittle integrations, batch ETL, and siloed warehouses.

In this session, we’ll walk through the Confluent Data Streaming Platform (DSP), which is built on Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®, and a reference architecture you can use to ship governed, reusable real-time data products that power applications, analytics, and AI workloads.

Attendees will leave with practical patterns to modernize existing Kafka and batch pipelines while maintaining security, lineage, and compliance.

Speaker Three:
Sreeram Machavaram C, Principal Architect @ Cognizant

Title of Talk:
From "Data Rich and Information Poor" utility To "Event-driven, Real-time intelligent" operations

Abstract:
Utilities are massive and complex. Whether it’s water, gas, or rail, they operate treatment works, pumping stations, compressor sites, signalling systems, and vast networks that span cities and regions. Keeping these services running safely and continuously means collecting and interpreting data from highly distributed sites and their connected networks in real time. This machine data — from PLCs, sensors, third-party devices, and operational systems — reflects the physical world: pumps starting, valves opening, pressure fluctuating, trains moving, gas flows changing. But raw telemetry is noisy, inconsistent, and deeply technical. SCADA and other OT systems are often siloed and reactive. Engineering signals are hard for IT to interpret, leaving organisations unable to combine OT data with IT-based analytics and intelligence in real time.

The result: fragmented visibility, alarm fatigue, and reactive decision-making. A Unified Namespace (UNS) and event-driven stream processing provides a solution. Using MQTT to publish operational events, Kafka as the enterprise backbone, and Flink for scalable stream processing, raw telemetry is filtered, contextualized, and transformed into meaningful, business-ready events. The outcome is IT-OT convergence in action — turning reactive, siloed systems into event-driven, real-time intelligent operations Intended to give a high-level approach and architecture around IO-OT convergence using UNS, Event Driven and Stream processing in modern intelligent utilities.

Bio:
Sreeram Machavaram C is hands-on practitioner specialising in utility solutions across IT-OT convergence, real-time data architectures, and stream processing. He works in a team that designs and builds event-driven systems that bridge operational technology (OT) and enterprise IT, enabling utilities to transform raw telemetry into actionable intelligence.

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If you are interested in hosting/speaking at a meetup, please email community@confluent.io