Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That positions the company in terms of competitive landscape. Now I’m going to ask you to extract yourself out of Tidemark and look at the industry as a whole. What’s happening in the cloud and analytics industry? What are the big trends that you are tracking and actually doing something interesting with? Where do you see the opportunities in that space? What are unsolved problems that you are detecting based on your vantage point?

Christian Gheorghe: Great question. I could talk about that all day long. There are many areas and we have written about them. If you look at past revolutions, analytics has always been about a rear-view mirror type of approach. You have to tell me what has happened so that I can make decisions today and run the business in a structured process. One of the things that we’re seeing is the move where analytics are becoming the fabric of our interactions in both cloud-to-cloud consumption and personal. We are getting more and more wired. We have more sensors producing a tremendous amount of streams of data. We are tweeting like crazy. What happens with all that massive amount of data when you need to make discussions, understand what’s going on, or plan for the future?

What we’re seeing is a movement from where analytics have been at-the-side and the domain of the few to a model that is contextual to everything we do, both at home and work. When that happens, there’s a significant amount of transformation that occurs. The trend is contextual data-driven decisions that is highly personalized, highly collaborative, highly consumerized. This has never before been seen before.

Data that no longer lives in our own databases is what’s driving significant amount of rethinking of what an enterprise analytical stack should look like and do. That’s where we are focusing at Tidemark as we now enter into our next phase. What does it mean if your thermostat is now a Google-enabled device? What does it mean if it can send the entire stream of data in real time of when you’re coming home or how many people you have in your family? When it goes down, the customer gets a support call instantaneously from a device that is mobile and wired to your home. How do you deal with that support service? The entire model by which you service your customers changes. You have this entire visibility to understand that this might be a customer who has the entire house wired and not just tinkering with one thing. It changes the type and fabric of the context of analytics that you need to do.

Parallel to this, you have the fact that without the context around what matters with people, you basically have a bunch data streams that are coming at you in an ever increasing velocity, variety, and veracity. You are not making sense of it unless you consider the context around those decisions. That’s very interesting to us. We think that drives the demand for the applications we provide. They are collaborative. They are mobile first. They understand that you are a person, that you have questions, that you run a line of business, that you have a team. It’s not the old way of looking at things, which is, “That’s a department. Go to 17 screens of Excel grids and tabs.”

Sramana Mitra: Are you providing the workflow around this as well?

Christian Gheorghe: Absolutely. That’s where I was going with this. What you’re seeing is the emergence of analytical processes that are contextualized for the users. I’ve seen you write about this. It’s not unlike what you’ve seen with ERP, which used to be a desperate set of tools and silos. Now, no company will start without an order-to-cash or a hire-to-manage. These types of processes never existed in analytics. Because of this contextualization of data-driven decisions, the need for analytical processes becomes critical. We have that at the core of any analytical application that Tidemark offers.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe
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