Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sandy Steier, CEO of 1010data (Part 1)

Sandy Steier is the chief executive officer of 1010Data, the leading provider of cloud-based big data analytics. Sandy counts more than 25 years of experience in the industry and is known as one of the innovators behind the adoption of advanced analytics in the financial sector. In this interview Sandy gives us insights into 1010data’s problem solving capabilities, especially in the financial and retail sector, and he discuses his opinion of the current state of big data analytics.

Sramana Mitra: Sandy, let’s start with some context about 1010data. What do you guys do, who are your target customers and what scale are you operating at?

Sandy Steier: 1010data was founded in 2000. It was me and my co-founder, Joel Kaplan. The mission even then, and it hasn’t changed all that much, was to allow companies to analyze big data for whatever purpose they might have – so it is a horizontal solution – and to allow them to do it in as simple a way as possible. The paradigm we basically mimicked was the idea of the experience of a spreadsheet, which allows even non-technical people to do a lot of analysis. We extended that to unlimited amounts of data.

SM: What vertical do you specialize in? I understand it is a horizontal solution, but I imagine you have gone to the market with some vertical spin.

SS: We operate in several verticals. The primary vertical – we have two – is the capital markets part of financial services. The New York Stock Exchange is a customer, and a lot of the large banks and trading houses, hedge funds and investors are our customers. That sector is a large part of our focus. The other one is retail. We have some large retailers who are our customers, and that is a growing area for us. We also operate in most of the other sectors such as healthcare, telecom, government, transportation, gaming, etc. There are several other areas as well, but the two that I mentioned are the primary focus.

SM: Your personal roots are in Wall Street, is that correct?

SS: Yes. I worked on Wall Street for about 15 years. My co-founder did too – he was on Wall Street even longer than I was – primarily on the capital market side in places like Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and UBS. I was really on the business side for most of the period I was there. For instance, in the Morgan backed securities department. In that capacity I really did the corporate finance works, and I had oversight of the new trading functions and new issuance functions of the firm.

SM: Let’s start there, then. Obviously, finance is a big vertical for you. Let’s take a couple of customers in finance and walk us through what kinds of problems you are solving and what kinds of technologies you are using to solve those problems.

SS: Let’s start with the New York Stock Exchange. They were our first significant customer. The problem we solved for them then – and over time it has expanded – was to allow their audience, mostly their member firms and other dealers and traders who use the New York Stock Exchange data, to get at their data. The NYSE publishes a lot of data, a lot of it in real time during the course of the day, but they do provide all of that data as a batch process to the world as well, so they can do a historical analysis. We basically stepped in there and took over that function in terms of distributing that data.

We also made that data available within our system. Our system is a cloud-based service for data analysis that is modeled on the spreadsheet idea. What we did was take all of their data, put in onto our platform and open up that platform to their user base. Someone who wanted to analyze historical trades, quotes or limit orders could get the data and seal it – imagine a spreadsheet with hundreds of billions of records in it, and [people could] manipulate it as if they were using it as a spreadsheet. That is basically what we allowed then. That relationship has expanded over time and now in fact they are white labeling our solutions so they have an expanded offering where again people who want to analyze that data are able to find that data, access it and analyze it on 1010data. Then they put their own branding on it. Basically it is branded by the NYSE, and people can then do their analysis.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sandy Steier, CEO of 1010data
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