Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 2)

Eldad Farkash: A different example would be Galaxy Semiconductor. I’m taking you to a completely different spectrum. They actually test hardware, usually in Asia where most of the semiconductor industry is. They want to use analytics to crunch billions of records that represent wafer cost. They want to have the visualization that shows them, during the QA process of wafers, how well the wafer is produced. They visualize this by drawing this heat map over the wafer and giving an indication which points are valid and which are invalid. To get this simple picture, they need to go through billions of records and crunch them in real time. We’re talking about asking around 5,000 SQL queries running over a few minutes over billions of records and getting visualization out.

A different customer would be a website building tool. They just IPO’d a year ago. They use analytics internally. For them, every employee is an information employee. They want to get everyone the Sisense tool for which every employee can, on a daily basis, enhance their Tableau and Excel experience with Big Data. This is how they use Sisense together with those different tools to get this result. We have outbound and inbound. We have companies that use it for internal usage. We have companies who use it as part of their product. The core is always the same. It’s about creating models that combine and mash up different data sources and getting dashboards on top of them with a single stack. It doesn’t have to be a long IT or big data project to get there.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the ecosystem and the industry in general. How is that evolving? From you vantage point, what are the major trends in your sector?

Eldad Farkash: First of all, there are two Big Data camps. The first one is about infrastructure. I would put Cloudera, Hortonworks, and the legacy players in this group. They focus on storage mainly. They focus mainly on the ability to store those massive amounts of data. The second camp is the analytics camp. Those vendors focus on tapping into this data and trying to turn it into something valuable for business users. I would split it up into those who try to do those automatically by applying some kind of intelligence to the process and the second part of this camp would be companies who use technology to speed up analytics in a way that gives you productivity to ask questions.

One camp would be the domain expertise of the company that sells productivity tools and they depend on the customer and user to figure out what to ask and how to make something meaningful out of it. The second camp would be those who try to figure out what the problem is in the first place. They are not contradicting each other. I’ve seen companies starting with one and adding the other and vice versa. I think on a bigger picture, the market is really getting divided up into those two groups – the big infrastructure guys and the companies who try to solve user problems.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense
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