Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is actually a good segue to my final question. Where do you point entrepreneurs to look for opportunities for building new companies? I think we’ve already started that discussion. If you take the base layer of unstructured data and then on top of that, you look at the different application areas. You were saying to apply another filter to it, which is try to find things that you can sell to business users without having to deal with IT in the process, and focus on application areas that can take advantage of 20% of the high-impact data that is really going to drive the heuristics value. Can you give some concrete examples of business problems where these apply?

Ulf Zetterberg: You look at contracting. Today, if you get a new contract which has provisions and clauses that you haven’t seen before or it’s the first time you do the contract, you solely rely on lawyers. You have to send the template. They review and send them back. I think many customers feel like, “This is information that they already knew and their service is overpriced.” Assume now that this is a self-service legal clause library out there. When you get these contracts, you don’t need to go to your law firm anymore. You send the contract to your cloud instance which tells you, “Based on what everybody else doing, this seems to be pretty much okay.”

The biggest problem for most companies for most of these legal clauses and decisions is the grayscale. What is the opportunity you need to trade-off? The ability to quickly verify contract based on what others have done in that jurisdiction is a great thing. That’s a good example of self-service. Contracting is one example. The same service can be applied for many other industries.

Sramana Mitra: I love this discussion. It’s actually offering concrete framework for how to look at the unstructured data problem inside the enterprise. Do you have slightly more specific pointers when you look around in the enterprise? Are there other areas that are crying for solutions like this that you have seen or heard from customers?

Ulf Zetterberg: I think the self-service as a concept is something that comes up a lot. It’s something that you can do without big investments and big projects. With self-service, you can subscribe. Then once you get this what-if analysis, you have this piece of content that you want to have validated or verified. Can you send that out to an application where you don’t need to be the expert but where you trust the source? That source checks it for you and tells you if it is good or bad. That’s something that is very compelling for many businesses because speed is everything and the information is powering them.

Automated self-services create a lot of interest. It’s a good look at this 80/20 rule. Usually, 80% of what you do is plain vanilla in most businesses. Can you automate that and make sure that we don’t spend on something that is plain vanilla? You want to capture those things that are outside the norm. That’s where you still want human intervention or your best lawyers. The automation self-service will not fix everything, but if it can take care of 50% to 70% of what we do today; we save on people costs, which is expensive in most industries. It’s a massive savings. It’s cost savings, but it’s also speed.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software
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