Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s not usually easy to sell pure horizontal. In the world of complex queries, what is missing? If you look at the universe, what are the specific things or capabilities that are missing from the ecosystem that would help you and help your customers, and that could be opportunities for new companies to be born?

Marc Alacqua: It seems that the competitors have dumbed down the ability to do complex searches. In our experience, we’ve always been tightly tied to the users in the end. We try to create a user interface that serves a variety of users. From what we’ve seen, the ability to do both separates us from a lot of the other products out there.

Sramana Mitra: That’s your differentiation. The question I asked is what is the opportunity for new entrepreneurs to start new companies.

Marc Alacqua: That’s a good question.

Sramana Mitra: Not an easy question actually.

Steve Davis: There’re a lot of limitations in technologies for graph databases and understanding relationships between things. That’s something that even we, as a company, are trying to tackle, but there is ample room for entrepreneurship in identifying relationships between different kinds of data and especially non-obvious relationships.

The analysis use case example is if you’ve got two very different kinds of data, there’re a lot of things that might exist in both – references to people and references to specific kinds of vehicles. Really understanding the complex relationships between those very different kinds of data and representing that visually is done, but it’s not easy to scale. There are graph databases that exist but they’re not nearly as scalable as some of the other big data solutions. That might be a little technical.

Sramana Mitra: As I’m thinking about your marketplace, the missing piece in figuring out where to apply your technology is domain knowledge. If you look at a variety of different industries and verticals where your technology could be applied, if you could pair up with people who have domain knowledge, they could be able to provide you with the specs and what’s missing.

I’m thinking about a problem in the context of your situation. It strikes me that domain knowledge may be the missing piece to bring this all to the next level.

Marc Alacqua: You’re right. We would have meetings and we’re like, “Cool story. Not sure how this helps me.” We’ve tried to create strategic partnerships and working with channel partners who either have that domain knowledge or they have the kind of clients that we like to work with. They are already existing clients and they understand some of their problems. It’s really shortening the amount of time it takes to figure out what the problem to be solved is when we’re going in an industry that we don’t know a lot about.

Sramana Mitra: Cool. I think I’ve got what you’re trying to do. Thanks for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire
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