What does “infrastructure” mean when your data stays exactly where it is, yet suddenly behaves like a graph?

I met Weimo Liu, CEO and co-founder of PuppyGraph, during an IT Press Tour presentation, and I wanted to bring his story to Infrastructure As A Conversation because this is a data infrastructure conversation at its core. Weimo’s pitch is simple to say and harder to pull off: keep a single copy of data in your lake or warehouse, skip the ETL pipelines, and still run graph queries with subsecond performance.

Weimo’s background explains why this is more than a clever demo. He worked at TigerGraph, then on Google’s F1 team, and PuppyGraph sits right between those worlds. In our conversation, he walks me through how they treat graph queries as a set of node and edge operations that can be optimized, parallelized, and evaluated in a vectorized way, which is how they keep performance predictable when workloads get real.

We also get into the practical details infrastructure teams care about. PuppyGraph is a read-only engine, which changes the trade-offs around concurrency, governance, and operational risk. Instead of copying data into a separate graph store and building a second set of controls, you can query relationships where the data already lives, then write results back into the lake for other engines to consume. The upside is simpler architecture and less duplication. The compromise is that you are not getting transactional graph updates, and Weimo is clear about why that is acceptable for the OLAP-style workloads his customers run.

From there, the use cases start to make sense fast. Cybersecurity teams with logs sitting in object storage, fraud detection scenarios where latency matters, and internal AI chatbots that struggle with too many tables and brittle SQL generation. Weimo has a sharp analogy for that last part, text-to-graph queries behave more like a train on rails, which can help AI stay inside defined relationships and reduce messy answers.

If you are building modern data platforms and you are tired of pipelines multiplying, this episode is a thought-provoking look at what happens when graph analytics becomes a query layer rather than a destination system. And it all started with a dog-themed name and a surprisingly cheap domain.

When does automating tasks stop being enough, and when does infrastructure itself need to become a shared conversation across teams?

In this episode of IT Infrastructure as a Conversation, I’m joined by Peter Sprygada, Chief Architect at Itential, for a deep and refreshingly pragmatic discussion about how infrastructure operations have evolved from scripts and isolated automation into something far more complex and interconnected. Peter has spent more than a decade working across enterprise networks, cloud platforms, and automation tooling, and that experience shows in how he talks about what has genuinely changed, and what has not.

We trace the journey from early network automation, born out of engineers trying to escape repetitive CLI work, to the point where automation alone starts to break down. Peter explains why automation excels in domains but struggles across end-to-end systems, and why orchestration becomes essential once infrastructure has to align with real business intent. Instead of teams pointing fingers when something fails, orchestration creates a common language that allows network, cloud, application, and platform teams to work toward the same outcome, even when they use different tools and terminology.

We also tackle AI head-on, separating operational reality from conference stage promises. Peter shares his own initial skepticism, why treating AI as a tool rather than a silver bullet matters, and how the same lessons learned from automation apply again today. We talk about governance, guardrails, and what Peter calls the boring stuff, the logging, security, and controls that actually make innovation sustainable at scale. As infrastructure complexity continues to rise, he argues that many leaders still underestimate just how much engineering effort is required to keep modern platforms reliable.

Looking ahead, Peter outlines how the traditional boundaries between orchestration, automation, and observability are already starting to blur, and why investing in platforms that can evolve matters more than chasing the latest shiny technology. This conversation stays grounded in real operational challenges, real tradeoffs, and real lessons learned in the field, not abstract futures. As infrastructure stacks continue to grow more complex and AI becomes part of daily operations, are IT leaders ready to treat infrastructure less like a collection of tools and more like an ongoing conversation that never really stops?

Useful Links

• Connect with Peter Sprygada
• Learn more about Itential,

Thanks to our sponsors, Alcor, for supporting the show.

What happens when someone who helped shape the early days of virtualization returns to the field to lead a new era of secure, flexible computing? At IGEL’s Now & Next event in Frankfurt, I sat down with Peter Goldbrunner, Regional Vice President for Central Europe, to explore how his decades of experience at Citrix and Nutanix are helping drive IGEL’s transformation into a software-focused security leader.

Peter’s background provides him with a unique vantage point on the evolution of enterprise technology. From server-based computing to cloud and now prevention-first endpoint security, he has witnessed every wave of IT transformation firsthand. In this conversation, he explained how IGEL’s evolution is meeting the moment for customers facing economic pressure, complexity, and the demands of hybrid work. He also described why the endpoint is emerging as the new control point for business continuity and security, rather than the weakest link.

We also discussed what it means to lead transformation within a company that has already reinvented itself. Peter shared how the German-speaking markets are balancing cost control with innovation, why local trust matters, and how IGEL’s role-based approach to security helps organizations prepare for what comes next. His perspective on collaboration, learning, and execution offered a clear reminder that transformation is not just about technology; it is about people, priorities, and timing.

As the Now & Next tour continues, Peter’s insights demonstrate why resilience and prevention are now inseparable for any organization that wants to thrive in a world where security and productivity are inextricably linked. How can companies ensure their IT strategies are ready for what comes next?

Useful Links

• Connect with Peter Goldbrunner, on LinkedIn
  • Learn more about IGEL
  • Follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube

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