Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are you thinking about this in terms of a platform? Let’s say you provide the platform and infrastructure to bring all this data together in an accessible, manageable, and query-able way. On top of that you are going to need heuristics that are application specific. That brings me back to my original question about heuristics. Where are the heuristics coming from to take that beach and run a business process on it? You are going to need industry-specific heuristics. That requires a tremendous amount of domain-specific knowledge within any industry.

Kon Lelong: I would compare the data analytics and the heuristics to the e-discovery world. Both of them use a sandbox approach. In terms of applying creativity using heuristics and advanced intelligence methodologies, every day there will be someone waking up with a new creative way that no one else has thought of and will extract information in a slightly different and more value-added way. This will continue.

We provide the management of the beach and allow analytics to mature to a certain extent that can be applied to it. That allows you the first cull of most relevant data. Then, having chosen the gems you believe are most relevant from scouring the beach, you can apply value-added processes, and you can actually go crazy with the creativity on how to extract heuristic techniques.

SM: Then you have all this data from multiple silos in a query-able, uniform structure. Let’s say I am an expert in advertising technology and how to do ad targeting. So far, one of the problems in the domain of ad targeting is that there is no correlation between the CRM systems of various enterprises and the advertising targeting. As an example, I have been a customer of Netflix from time immemorial. Yet often I am shown ads for Netflix. Why? It is a complete waste. I don’t need to be shown any ads from Netflix. I am a loyal customer of Netflix. There is no correlation between the CRM system and the ad targeting system. Perhaps this could be an application on top of your platform that somebody who understands ad targeting technologies could pull off.

KL: There are layers of what you are talking about. The first one is internal unstructured data. The next is internal structured data. Then there is external unstructured and external structured data. What you are talking about is the last one.

SM: You could come up with use cases where all four are kicking into gear.

KL: Precisely. That is where infinite use cases open up.

SM: If you open it as a platform and give developers the tools and technologies to be able to be creative and bring their domain knowledge and heuristics development capabilities to it, then your platform will really make it to the largest ones.

KL: We will never have a lock hold on creativity on the jewelry making. For truly innovative jewelry, there are many out there who will come up with better solutions. But we own the diamond mines.

SM: Kon, it was a pleasure talking to you. Goodbye.

KL: Goodbye.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies
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