Thought Leaders in Big Data: Chris Astle, CEO of QSR (Part 1)

A point of view on Big Data from Australia.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as QSR. Please set some context for us.

Chris Astle: Thank you for inviting me to participate. I’m the CEO of QSR International. QSR International is a software publisher of a product called NVivo. We provide software that helps organizations look at the human aspects of their data and help them to understand the insights that make decisions powerful. Our business is 30 years young. We originally came out of a university here in Australia.

Our origin is around sociology and humanities. Today, you’ll find our software being used both in an academic context, but more importantly, in government and international organizations. The value that you see our software brings is starting to look at the world of Big Data and how information collected from websites and social media feeds can be combined with information from humans and bring these two together.

We see that more and more organizations want to invest more in understanding key themes and sentiments from their customers. Our software is starting to provide some significant value to these organizations in reaching those goals.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down and walk us through use cases of the types of customers that you cater to and the types of business problems that you help solve on their behalf.

Chris Astle: From a government perspective, we are being used by the Department of Veteran Affairs. They support the needs of soldiers who have come back from war. Our software helps the Department connect the thoughts, sentiments, and narratives of those veterans, with comments coming from care providers and hospitals. Our software brings those different communication channels together. It then allows them to combine that information with information they have within their environment to compare and contrast the impact.

From a corporation perspective, we see many organizations putting significant amount of money into development of new products or development of relationships. Time and time again, you’ll see our software is being used to understand some of those open emotions that people are expressing around the brand or the customer experience in either a positive, neutral, or negative way. We’re effectively seeing ourselves now being used as a mechanism to validate some of the thinking that is coming through Big Data systems.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Chris Astle, CEO of QSR
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