Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire (Part 3)

Steve Davis: One of our largest clients is one of the largest auto manufacturers in North America. They have a problem analyzing various data sources that might have valuable information that could contribute to analysis of emerging safety issues. All of their data sources are all in separate systems.

They had a notion to incorporate all of that data into a data lake. What they realized is the data lake doesn’t really solve the problem. It just consolidates the access. They brought us in to fuse that data so that the users don’t have to worry about where the data came from. They can just access it all at the same time.

They have a user interface that allows them to work together to create complex queries and discover emerging safety issues. Its ultimate goal is to identify recallable parts sooner so they don’t have to wait until there’s an obviously abnormal number of fatalities on the road that leads them to figure out that a part should have been recalled a long time ago. They can get ahead of the game.

Sramana Mitra: Do you go to market as a purely horizontal solution or do you have any strategy where you’re seeing more traction in certain verticals?

Steve Davis: Horizontal versus vertical is something that a lot of companies struggle with these days. What we strive to create with our products is a platform that is useful enough across multiple verticals but is still not too generic that it doesn’t solve specific problems. That’s something that we continue to investigate. We’ll continue to investigate how best we can apply our technology.

For example, we’ve found a lot of success in emerging safety issues in the automotive space. Applying that same technology to the insurance space has a lot of similarities but there’re also a lot of very specific questions that insurance analysts want answered. When we discover those, we look back to see how that capability applies to our previous work.

Sramana Mitra: Are there particular industries where you’re seeing more traction than others regardless if it’s something you’re doing deliberately? Are you seeing industries where you’re being brought in more?

Marc Alacqua: We look to see where the translation is the easiest as we talk to different kinds of companies. On insurance side, the kind of data that they had was very similar. For the translations from warranty claims to insurance claims, you don’t have to take a huge leap to see how those things are alike.

Sramana Mitra: This is why I like use cases. If you find the use case where you’re doing well, you can always take that use case to similar comparable companies and sell that same use case.

Marc Alacqua: We had a playbook that had one play. We did really well in the auto. That was our biggest win. As we build out our binder of use cases, we try to find ones that are the most similar so that people don’t have to take a shot in the dark. We’ve been growing more and more use cases. When we talk about the horizontal versus the vertical, we could probably solve everyone’s problems, but if you lose focus, it’s hard.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire
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