Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 4)

Radhika Subramanian: It’s a method that extracts all of those queries – what we call non-node queries. Send the data and say, “These are all the questions you should have asked. I’m going to rank it for you the way Google does. With that, I will isolate just the core of what you need to know.” Let me give this to you in an example so that it’s not so abstract.

Let’s take a retail example. Retail data is something everybody understands because everybody shops. So you go to a grocery store. A grocery store typically has about 20,000 items in the store. The data from a retail store is all of those items that the customer bought. In a search method, what you would be doing with the data is asking, “Do people buy this kind of sauce with this kind of pasta with this kind cheese?” That’s a query. If the answer is yes, it’ll give you, “Yes, here are all the other times that happened.”

What Emcien’s method will do is when the data goes into Emcien’s engine and comes back, “I’m going to tell you all of the things that are bought together. I will do better than that. I will actually sort it for you. I’ll tell you these are very strong connections. They happen a lot – high frequency. Few people buy these but when they buy this, they always buy with this other thing.” How does Emcien’s do it? One of our patents is on a search-querying database. It’s essentially querying itself and it’s extracting all of the non-node queries in data. A connection pattern is inside. If I can give you all the connection patterns ranked, I have given you all the insight.

Sramana Mitra: That was very helpful. From there, my question then is going to be who are the competitors? The best way to frame that is whom do you see in deals?

Radhika Subramanian: The competitors today are all statistical methods. The market not knowing about the available method is a competitor. One of the reasons why our partnership with a company like MCL is so valuable is it gives us the voice to be able to speak to the retail sector and say, “This is available now. You don’t have to do this the hard way.” Sometimes, not knowing that something is possible is actually also a huge barrier and a huge competitor.

Sramana Mitra: There’s so many of the Big Data companies, so to speak, that are approaching retail. They’re doing stuff in retail. AgilOne is doing stuff in retail. These are all high-end analytics companies that are doing stuff in the retail sector. I’m still looking for some type of, in the standard industry parlance, an ecosystem map situating you in that ecosystem with respect to other players.

Radhika Subramanian: The setup and implementation of Emcien’s solutions is so easy  – almost needs to be no scheme, no modeling, no queries.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien
1 2 3 4 5 6 7