Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I think the bottom line is they are not architecturally in a place to handle a dynamic environment.

Sasha Gilenson: A truly dynamic environment, yes. Let’s say there is an urgent issue with a particular application. The system administrator runs and accesses the machine to fix the issue; because it is so critical, it needs to be fixed immediately. So these tools essentially say, “Someone bypassed my model and I don’t recognize this change, so what I will do is reverse the change back to my model.” That is the way they think. Instead of helping to assess this change and maybe to distribute it to the rest of the machines, what they will do is delete this change. That is how they operate.

SM: If you were to advise a young company to go after this problem, trying to tackle the dynamic environment, would you to ask them to build on top of your data?

SG: First of all, we also provide part of the data. The whole space of operations analytics is very young. If you look at the number of companies that operate in it, there are probably only a handful that were really built for this purpose. Many of these companies are focusing on performances that apply to data, as there are multiple sources of the data that have not been covered yet – also the analysis. I think that even before jumping into automation, there is plenty of work and there are plenty of opportunities in analytics. The next step is to leverage the analytics technologies for automation.

SM: That is very interesting. Is there anything else you would like to add?

SG: The important thing to emphasize is that the term “big data” on one hand is a buzzword. I will give you an example: When we started back in 2007 – in terms of the pace of releases – you had quarterly releases, annual releases, and so on. Development methods were just starting. Today you go to the most mature and strict organizations – the banks – and they have weekly and daily releases. The level of dynamics and complexity has grown tremendously over the last six years.

SM: In a certain category, it grew tremendously. There is also a tremendous simplification by moving things to the public cloud, where the complexity is handled by the cloud service provider.

SG: I see there is a certain class of new applications that are built on the public cloud service. But at the same time, what I see in enterprises is that many of them are going to the private cloud. The reason is not just security. They go to the private cloud because the public cloud does not offer sufficient support for the complexities that they handle.

SM: The complexity is increasing as it is a private cloud environment, and the complexity has gone out [of it] for the people who are providing public cloud services. The complexity of independent software vendors providing public cloud services has gone up tremendously. But there are people who have simplified their situations, and there are people who have moved their business processes to the public cloud.

SG: I look at our customers, and they work with very advanced organizations. They were the first that experimented with the public cloud years ago. Still, the core of their business processes is in the private cloud. Again, some of the reasons are the complexity of and the dependency on legacy applications.

SM: I fully agree with you that the complexity has gone up. Thank you for your time, Sasha.

SG: Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven
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