Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 4)

Wolf Ruzicka: The fourth bucket is anything related to mobile applications. Please don’t think about Flappy Birds type of application. Think of the enterprise-level applications.

If one of the startups gets listed on NASDAQ, NASDAQ will try to upsell that newly-listed company to products that we have developed for NASDAQ around mobile.

For instance, the Board of Directors may use a mobile application by NASDAQ in order to exchange highly-insider information. Should the CEO be fired? Should we give more cashback to our shareholders? These types of discussions can move stock prices. You want to be very careful about it.

At the same time, the Board needs to collaborate around this information and decide jointly to turn this information into public information. We built this entire system on mobile. Over the years, that generated intellectual property for us. That’s a startup called Sympli.io where a hundred thousand customers are building mobile and web apps using Sympli.

The last area is if you do these kinds of things, at scale, on top of insider information, then you better understand identity and access management so that when Polina locks into a website, she doesn’t suddenly get my personal health records. That constitutes a major part of our business as well.

A good example would be what we did for the American Red Cross where 250 million Americans have given their private data through blood donations or monetary donations. These 250 million are managed through a system that we’ve built.

Sramana Mitra: In all these touchpoints that you have contributed to, have you observed opportunities for building new products that you could point some entrepreneurs looking for problems to solve to build new companies? Can you point to some of these open problems?

Wolf Ruzicka: My whole professional career is in big data. I started at Microstrategy. I was one of the earliest employees there. We ran it up to 2,700 employees. The bubble imploded and we had to let go of 2,000 of those 2,700. We rebuilt and made it healthy.

The big data field has gone through an incredible transformation as far as these types of tools and systems are concerned. There are vendors that pretend that they have a holistic solution to solve all of these types of issues that come along with a big data project.

The truth of the matter is, none of them really have such a holistic and integrated solution. There’re a lot of fragmented little tools that focus on one thing and do it really well. I see the future in having these types of systems and products be much more tightly integrated.

A major part of any of those types of efforts relates to simply putting these systems from different vendors together so they can actually work with each other. That’s classical system integration.

I feel that this type of loosely connected products that require a lot of software development before you start your big data project needs entrepreneurs to look into and be able to do something similar to what we did at Kublr where we took all of these different technologies and made them work together flawlessly.

The same is needed in the big data space. You can’t just go to IBM and then use their Cognos together with Watsons. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science
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