Thought Leaders in Big Data: Zetaris CEO Vinay Samuel (Part 3)

Vinay Samuel: Seven years ago, I was sitting in a think tank with a group of people after we had exited. We said, “Do we do another centralized data warehousing platform? Do we do another Green Plum or Vertica?” The future we saw was a future that said, “In our journey, no customer had achieved that single view of all their data. Every customer we knew had data everywhere. They still had lots of data marts, data streams, and files.”

The big future we bet on was that data would proliferate and, at some point, it doesn’t matter where the data is. I just need a query engine. Think of a data platform that’s a nervous system that’s aware of all the data that’s everywhere and can give you the answer in a conformed manner. We saw customers struggling with bringing data together. The data projects are taking too long.

Gartner will tell you that 80% of big data projects are failing. Now it’s down to 70%. They fail because they’re too hard, have data quality issues, or are too costly. We saw that problem and we started it in a garage in Melbourne, Australia.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a bootstrapped startup?

Vinay Samuel: I started with a bunch of programmers both in Melbourne and India. We found some amazing talent. Also in South Korea. There were some ex-Oracle optimizers. When I worked for those other data warehousing startups, we learned a lot about how to make those systems work. I actually collected a team of people who had already worked with me and brought them to the company.

Sramana Mitra: Bootstrapped?

Vinay Samuel: Yes, at the start. We brought in some seed money in Australia. We did a Series A with a company called Exto Partners which is a Sydney-based VC. We’ve taken about $50 million worth of investment which is much smaller compared to our competitors. We’ve had a really efficient model compared to some of our competitors.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine your deals are large deals.

Vinay Samuel: Yes, predominantly, we deal with tier one and tier two companies. We’ve had great investment from Singapore from Volpus Capital. In-Q-Tel and CIA have invested because of the disruptive nature of the technology in terms of changing the speed at which you can analyze data. We’ve had customers come to us and say, “We’ve got a three-month project and we’re looking at hiring 10 people for this.” We ended up doing it in less than a week because we don’t have to do all the data movement. We don’t move data.

Sramana Mitra: What I like about your go-to-market strategy is this notion of composite add-ups. You’re not moving data into a centralized space, but you have specific applications in specific use cases where you are bringing data from multiple sources. You’re basically equipping system integrators with implementing those composite apps where they have relationships and presence.

Vinay Samuel: Thank you. That’s a wonderful summary.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Zetaris CEO Vinay Samuel
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