Thought Leaders in Big Data: Incorta CEO Osama Elkady (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: All the technology is your technology? 

Osama Elkady: Yes. You don’t have to assemble five different technologies and transfer data between them. It’s one integrated platform where they have unlimited storage and power, especially for running on the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Since you’re working on so many use cases across so many different types of companies, can you talk about the architecture? It sounds like it’s a platform and then you have an application layer on top.

Osama Elkady: Incorta reinvented how analytics or relational databases work. A lot of the systems out there require customers to use ETL. The ETL process also includes flattening the data or building a simple model so the data can be utilized by business users.

This is where the blackhole is. They work a lot on these models and at the end of the day, business users never use it. That is why you see companies still running with Excel files everywhere. Although they are spending tens of millions on these solutions, business users are still using Excel for everything.

This is where Incorta comes in. We do not require modeling or flattening of the data at all. We can load all this data and keep them in the same shape. That allows us to do things. We are enabling all the data for analytics. At the same time because we collect all the data in a standard format.

We believe that companies not only need access to data in a fast way, but they also need to be able to use the capabilities of predictive modeling and machine learning.

Since data is in an open standard format, it allows companies to also utilize Incorta to push data to so many other systems. We directly load data and push it there. With that direct data platform, we are able to save companies months and months of work and millions of dollars. 

Sramana Mitra: Are all the different use cases done internally or are you working with system integrators?

Osama Elkady: We have many partners around the world who are able to use companies utilize Incorta to the maximum. We are excited about the innovation of our partners. We have partners building for Salesforce, JD Edwards, Oracle.

We are able to provide a platform for so many partners to be able to innovate more on it and provide business value. We have partners who are specialized in certain verticals and are able to utilize Incorta to be able to provide an innovative solution to their customers. 

Sramana Mitra: How many partners do you have?

Osama Elkady: We have more than 50.

Sramana Mitra: Large and small included, you have about 50?

Osama Elkady: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you work with these partners, are you following a PaaS model? What is the structure of the deployment?

Osama Elkady: We have Incorta deployed on premise. Customers can install on-premise or on their cloud. They can also use our cloud. The good thing about our cloud is that we are not only opening our cloud for big companies, but we’re also going to open our cloud for developers and students. That will come later this year.

We will be able to give all those people access to our platform where they can learn more about data analytics, machine learning, predictive modeling. That’s a very important topic for so many young talent around the world. The challenge for them is they don’t have access to powerful machines.

We believe that there are so many small companies around the world who can use Incorta. We don’t have to make them pay. We really would like to help as many small companies around the world to utilize data for their benefit. They can use us for free, grow fast, and then they can upgrade to a premium platform. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that line of thought a bit further. The PaaS model that Salesforce pioneered is going to be a big trend in the future with all kinds of companies trying to build developer ecosystems and ISV ecosystems around their platforms.

The typical model in that case is, an independent software vendor builds a product on top of your platform. You start joint-selling. You have a marketplace and they’re selling through your marketplace. In that case, the standard revenue share that we see is about 30% goes to the platform vendor. What are your thoughts on that?

Osama Elkady: That’s exactly what’s happening today. It’s happening outside of our cloud platform. We have partners doing that directly. As you mentioned, we are building that Blueprints marketplace where we allow our partners to be able to upload their blueprints and sell through the Incorta marketplace.

We are very excited about how excited our partners are. We have partners looking at Incorta as a way to provide added value instead of just selling manpower. They can provide added value on top of Incorta. They make much more money by doing that. We’re working very closely with them and helping them build all these blueprints.

We’re also selling it for them through Salesforce, but it will also be available on our platform as well. They’re growing internationally – Australia, Japan, Middle East, Europe. We don’t have any sales organizations in these countries, but our partners are able to help us reach out to these customers. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Incorta CEO Osama Elkady
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