Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So you built a platform and you let the customers figure out what use case they want to apply it to?

Bob Tennant: No. Our experience in the past has been that it is very difficult to sell a platform. It is very hard to do if you are carrying a big company’s business card. What we are trying to do is to focus on markets and business problems where we think we can help. We sell a solution and we enable that solution with our platform. The nice thing about having a platform is that if you solve one business problem, it becomes very easy to say, “Would you like another business problem solved? That would just be a few more dollars.”

SM: You gain trust and knowledge of the data. Let me ask you to walk us through the top five “pain points” around which you open accounts.

BT: Managing data is one use case that is a real pain point.

SM: If I am a salesperson and I send an email to somebody saying, “Do you want me to manage your data?” I will get absolutely no response.

BT: Managing data for us gets broken down into data governance. For example, how do you delete data? One problem that I suspect many of your readers may find is that they approach problems solely from a technical perspective. But when you are dealing with data more generally, there are other influences that can and should be kept and how they can and should be kept. Solving a problem technically doesn’t necessarily solve from a regulatory or legal fashion. The Internet has been around for more than 15 years, and the data has piled up. The deep posture at most organizations is: “We don’t delete anything.” The reason for that is that nobody knows where to keep their other data for regulatory or legal purposes. The result of that is that the data has piled up and there is now a big need for organizations to figure out how to delete. That is one of the main use cases we refer to when we talk about managing data.

SM: So you are going into the departments of large organizations that have to deal with compliance, and you are telling them that they will have to comply with SEC compliance data?

BT: Actually, no. We are going into the CIO’s office and provide a solution so they can begin to delete data, and their legal department will not be mad at them for it.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind
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