Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said earlier that you are a close partner of Microsoft Azure. Azure is one of the platforms that is really working hard to establish as much abstraction as possible so developers can develop AI applications on top of that. What opportunities do you see emerging out of that trend? Microsoft is investing heavily in this.

Wolf Ruzicka: I’m really glad that you brought it up. First of all, I’d like to toot our own horn a little bit. Two or three weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas at their conference to get the Partner of the Year Award on behalf of my team.

I love Microsoft, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the only game in town. To tie ourselves completely to Microsoft would be a disservice to our ultimate customers. But you’re right. What Microsoft has accomplished over the last few years is really remarkable. Everyone should look at it.

I want to give you one more customer example to make it very concrete. It’s Exparte, which is in the legal field. As a service provider, you always want to be able to take as much as you can off-the-shelf and not recreate the wheel.

If we can offload the headache of maintaining a machine learning service to Microsoft, that’s probably the best way to go. It preserves our customers’ budget. It also means that we can take advantage of many of these types of solutions that have been solved and take advantage of it on behalf of Exparte.

Bloomberg just recently wrote them up because it looks like we’ve done something remarkable there. We’ve essentially automated the ability to predict the outcome of a certain set of a legal case for patent litigation.

When you lose a patent case, you can appeal to a Federal court. It would be worth to understand whether they have a chance to win the case and what factors they would need to change like the members of your legal team. The power of these types of predictions can be measured in gold when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in a lawsuit.

It looks like Exparte accomplished it. 99% of the technologies that we used were from Microsoft. The investments that they’ve made absolutely paid off.

Sramana Mitra: That’s enough perspective to do this story on. What you’re doing is identifying customer problems through services engagements and spinning out company after company. That’s a very interesting way of getting companies off the ground. What has been the outcome of these companies?

Wolf Ruzicka: Sympli has now turned into a cash cow. Kublr is just off to the races. If you ever watch TV, the reason why the TV signal from the Olympics hasn’t gone down is that a certain satellite provider uses Kublr in order to keep the infrastructure up at any time. A really big pride for us is when Apiphany got acquired by Microsoft. I’m not allowed to mention the numbers, but many of my team members here had a very nice payday.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eastbanc Technologies, Chairman Wolf Ruzicka and Polina Reshetova, Head of Data Science
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