Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You had a chance to understand the requirements of that market by catering to the legal industry, and then you went to the larger IT departments with the use case of catering to their legal issues.

Bob Tennant: Exactly. In order to understand how your customer needs to evolve, I would suggest to your readers that they pay attention to the people dynamics within an industry as well as to the technical dynamics. In the context of the legal world, you do not get to be the general counsel of Google or General Electric by working your way up the ranks – in that way you may become CEO. Typically what happens is you work your way up the ranks in a major law firm, and then you move laterally from the law firm to a corporation. In that case, we were able to leverage the reputation we developed in the legal space and end up in the corporate space. That might work differently in a different market.

SM: I am going to switch gears and ask you some industry questions. From where you sit and what you see around you, what are some of the key open problems that you have identified, but that are not ones you are solving because they are not what you are focused on?

BT: The underlying trend we have been building at Recommind is the trend that data volumes keep rising. As data volumes keep rising, that represents both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is as the data accumulates you need to manage it. The opportunity is that because you have the data you can now do forms of analysis that you weren’t doing before.

At Recommind what we are working on is both of those things, but we are largely focused on areas where we think we can add something unique. That is in the field of unstructured information and helping to manage and analyze unstructured information and connect it to structured information.

What I think something we are not working on, which is going to be increasingly problematic in the future, will be the set of problems around dealing with structured information as the scale increases. There is lots of work or at least talk about ways of scaling up databases, but there is a whole set of problems around the edges of that infrastructure, which need a lot of work – something as simple as building an analytical stack on top of a big database, or an application stack on top of Hadoop. Those are things that represent big challenges, and I think there will be a lot of opportunity in the future.

In terms of trends and opportunities, I would just keep my eyes open for things that you had identified as data growth – not just data growth in traditional sources, but a wide variety of different sources. There is a lot of work going on right now in terms of helping to manage data for mobile devices, large data volumes, large data volume analytics or visualization. Despite the fact that there is a lot of activity there, there are a lot of companies that I think are not doing it particularly well. Thinking about the user and applications on top of infrastructure is a very good place to spend your time.

SM: Thank you very much for your time. Goodbye.

BT: Thank you. Take care.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind
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