Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Robert Youngjohns, SVP and GM at HP Autonomy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How are you going about trying to solve that problem? Are you going at it in a horizontal mode, or are you trying to create verticalized solutions? The interviews that we have been doing in our big data coverage have seen a ton of companies that are working on certain verticals.

Robert Youngjohns: That is an insightful question and one that I have been thinking about a lot in the past months. When I arrived at Autonomy, the conventional wisdom was that you can create a shrink-wrapped off-the-shelf software product that can do this horizontally. The more I talk to customers, the more I realize that there is a very heavy vertical aspect to this and there is a need to plug in human intelligence on top of machine intelligence. Recently I was exchanging emails with our CTO on the difference between the machine augmented human intelligence an what I call the machine intelligence – human intelligence duality and which of those you are going down. It really does determine what you do and where you develop the product.

What we do with the product is define it with a series of services. For example, we have a video categorization service, a textual analysis service, etc. We have about 40 or 50 of these services in mind. Within these services, there is something you could conceptually get from Amazon or from HP’s own cloud offerings. Then you could build your own application solution on top of those core services. That is the discipline I produced on the way as we are pushing forward. That is the journey we are on right now, and I think it is the right way to get the right blend between the horizontality and the vertical nature, so we are able to target specific customer problems.

SM: What is the status of that effort right now? If you wanted to finish doing the horizontal platform layer, what time are you looking at?

RY: Like most application developments, it is a 90/10 rule. Ninety percent of the components already exist with Idol, but the 10% right now is making sure we formalize all that, document it, and then make it available as a web service layer. That is a conversation I have been going through with my CTO recently. I am very impatient by nature. I would like it on the roadmap for the next few months. He told me all the reasons why that is hard. None of them are technical reasons. They are more about processes and documentation. I am not sure if we are going to distribute it right now, but I’d be very disappointed if we are not out there with something within the next six months. What I do in a perfect world here is make these publicly available. I don’t know what the business model will be; we will have to work on that.  But we have looked at other companies that specialize in these vertical areas, to then look at these components and go and find a solution for our customers.

SM: One of our audience’s interest areas would intersect with yours, because we work largely with entrepreneurs. I think a lot of entrepreneurs would be interested in building on top of your platform. This is where they can bring in their domain knowledge and layer it on top of a platform that is well built. With the horizontal technologies, they can supply the vertical heuristics.

RY: That is exactly what we are looking to do. I have been on the whole horizontal and vertical thought before –“can you do all of it at once?” and I don’t think you can. You have to make choices and then use partners. In some cases it will be our own skills to do this. We are very deep in the security area, for example. That may be a vertical area we tackle ourselves, but in others we look for domain expertise.

SM: I think there is the opportunity to build a very interesting network of OEM partners, who are going to do serious businesses on specific verticals.

RY: We have done that in the past. But this takes it to a new level. Our OEM business in the past has been a very deeply embedded engine that sits behind someone else’s security software. This is a much more open layer that allows people to build solutions for verticals.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Robert Youngjohns, SVP and GM at HP Autonomy
1 2 3 4 5