Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a little bit about the way your company is organized? You do generic software development, but it looks like you’re doing specific stuff in AI-related technologies. What percentage of your company is focused on AI-related technologies?

Wolf Ruzicka: Before we go there, we have one more example that we can mention in case you’re eager to have actual customer names here.

Sramana Mitra: Go for it.

Wolf Ruzicka: One is in Houston – Houston’s transit agency. It’s where we applied one of our solutions called TerraIQ. On top of it, Polina and her team are applying very interesting methodologies for the topic that we’re talking about today.

Polina Reshetova: We’re using neural networks to predict arrival time for public transport. I like this project because it’s socially good. Now we’re looking at ways we can not only use historical data but also have external information.

Wolf Ruzicka: In that solution that I mentioned before, we tested the prediction capabilities of the product versus Google Transit. We were more accurate in predicting it.

Sramana Mitra: So now to my previous question.

Wolf Ruzicka: If I look across the customer portfolio from NASDAQ to ComCast and Facebook, what I see is five swim lanes. Each one of them represents about 20% of our revenue and work. The swim lane that we’re talking about now is big data. That’s 20% of our revenues.

In addition to it, we have predictive analytics. We built some of the solutions for SaaS Institute that they would sell on to their customers. We built some of the products for Microstrategy that they would sell to their own customers. That is the type of software product development that also falls into this category; not just the examples that Polina mentioned.

It often starts with a classical dashboarding or business intelligence type of work. It means that even for that, you have to work on top of good data which prepares you for the tip of the iceberg, which is what Polina just covered. That’s 20% of Eastbanc’s revenue.

Next is anything related to cloud and DevOps. We have been on the customer advisory board for Microsoft for Microsoft Azure even before they had an offering because we dabbled a lot in AWS.

The reason I mention it is, oftentimes, you have to be able to not just lift and shift data and systems into the cloud, but you have to, very nimbly, re-architect these types of systems in order to take advantage of cognitive services in the cloud. You have to be able to move data at speed. In case your data scientist needs compute power, you don’t want to have to reserve that type of infrastructure in case it’s needed. You want to be able to spin up thousands of servers at the time of need, and then spin them down.

That’s the type of work that we do around Kubernetes, Docker in the cloud arena. That’s 20% of our revenue.

A third of those type of bucket relates to software product development around portals and content management systems. Here, my favorite example is the Washington Post where, over time, they’ve become famous for having incredibly good infrastructure and services.

We have created for them a software product called Arc Publishing that generates its own independent software license revenue from the Washington Post competitors in order to power their websites, their mobile applications, and their content management systems. It’s a point of pride for me to be able to say that we accomplished these types of things.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science
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