Thought Leaders in Big Data: Incorta CEO Osama Elkady (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about a few open problems that you would like entrepreneurs out there to come and build on top of your platform? It could be industry sector specific. It could be functional. Just name a few solutions where you’re looking for such partners. 

Osama Elkady: A few things come to my mind that I believe will be important. One thing that we have seen is how entrepreneurs can save food waste through predictive modelling.

How can they help predict stock? How can they monitor store activity in real-time? What promotions can be created to avoid food waste? You’ll be amazed at how many billions of dollars are lost in food waste.

Sramana Mitra: I know. There is so much food wasted. I actually started one of the first ever fashion companies online in 1999. My game plan was to use predictive modeling. I started peeling the onion. I was struck by how unscientific and how non-mathematical their procedures and workflows were. 

Osama Elkady: There are two of our customers in retail and poultry. They told me that they have such a huge waste. They even have to pay to get trucks for those food wastes. Now they’re able to adjust that on an hourly basis. They’re not just able to increase their sales dramatically but also save 50% of the food waste within one month by tracking real-time activities.

The more the item gets closer to expiration date, the more it is elevated to higher people in the company. This is an example of how this can be implemented around the world. It will save us a huge amount of food waste. 

Sramana Mitra: France actually made it compulsory to donate food.

Osama Elkady: One of our companies that has been throwing out a lot of food every day has donation boxes coming to their stores. By 1PM, they are able to send promotion notifications if they see that some food needs to be flushed out faster. They avoid 40% of food waste within 25 days.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic.

Osama Elkady: Another thing is renewable energy. We are helping these solar panel companies. People still don’t know that there are so many options for getting solar power without having to spend a lot of money. If entrepreneurs can utilize electricity monitoring and predict usage and take that to the next level of helping people move to renewable energy, that will be huge as well.

Many other countries around the world are much more advanced in getting to renewable energy than the US. There are so many things around healthcare. You can go on and on. It has been very limiting how much data you can process and collect. With Incorta, we can break that barrier and get to unlimited data and power. 

Sramana Mitra: I’m extremely bullish on the PaaS trend where a lot of the complexities that you are talking about are built by a platform vendor. Then you get entrepreneurs from all different segments with different domain knowledge building applications on top. They are up and down the value chain.

Osama Elkady: The reason we want to open Incorta to developers and students around the world is because that will create innovation. All the ideas I gave you are from our customers who are innovating on our platform.

Students are now capable of doing things that we weren’t able to do. They are able to think differently. The only thing missing is access to resources. Allowing those young entrepreneurs to access resources is huge.

Sramana Mitra: We have a very active SaaS sector. There are 200 to 300 companies that are over $100 million ARR. There are another 300 to 400 companies that are at $50 million ARR.

Companies that are going to do successful PaaS strategies where they are able to create developer networks and entrepreneurs building on top of their platform are going to go to the next level. The most successful of this lot are going to be the ones in that category.

Osama Elkady: I totally agree with you.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Incorta CEO Osama Elkady
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