5 Thought Leaders in Big Data

Today the significant opportunities for entrepreneurship currently exist in the application layer of the Big Data industry. The platforms and plumbing are already in place.

The most exciting opportunities are going to be available to those entrepreneurs who harness the power of big data, but couple it with intense domain knowledge in specific areas of business. These five thought leaders are good examples of how to do that.

• Mike Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets – Marketing technologies are hot these days, and Metamarkets is doing some cutting edge analytics in the media buying area. Very interesting.
• Krishna Venkatraman, Senior Vice President of Analytics at OnDeck – The online lending industry is going through rapid changes with the advent of big data and machine learning in processing loan applications. Krishna discusses OnDeck’s workings.

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Featured Videos

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Mike Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets (Part 1)

Marketing technologies are hot these days, and Metamarkets is doing some cutting edge analytics in the media buying area. Very interesting.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Metamarkets and yourself.

Mike Driscoll: I’m the CEO and Founder of Metamarkets. We are a SaaS software platform that provides interactive analytics to the roles of leading programmatic media buying companies like AOL and Twitter. These companies use us to provide interactive analytics both internally and to buyers and sellers on their digital advertising markets. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Krishna Venkatraman, Senior Vice President of Analytics at OnDeck (Part 1)

The online lending industry is going through rapid changes with the advent of big data and machine learning in processing loan applications. Krishna discusses OnDeck’s workings.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with talking a bit about yourself in setting some context, and also introduce our audience to what OnDeck is doing in the realm of Big Data.

Krishna Venkatraman: Let me tell you a bit about myself. I joined OnDeck in October of 2013 as the leader for the data analytics organisation. I hadn’t really heard of OnDeck until I first talked to them. I found their value proposition fascinating. There was this huge unmet need among small businesses when they were looking for capital. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Scott Zoldi, Chief Analyst Officer at FICO (Part 1)

Have you noticed that your credit card sometimes declines transactions or flags fraud alerts? This conversation will help you understand the backstory of that workflow and potentially trigger other ideas in that domain.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to FICO.

Scott Zoldi: I’m the Chief Analyst Officer at FICO. I’ve been with FICO for 17 years. Today I have responsibility for all the analytics products and technologies that we use within our products. FICO, as a company, is 60 years old, and is well known for the analytics that we deliver to make better decisions for companies. The main thing that we offer is the FICO score. It’s a score that’s used in lending decisions as well as fraud detection. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Mark Schwarz, VP of Data Sciences at Square Root (Part 1)

Store management is going through transformation because of the data science. Read how the automobile sector is evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning and introduce our audience to booth Square Root and yourself.

Mark Schwarz: We’re a software company based out of Austin that delivers software in the store relationship management space. The store relationship management space has to do with making field staff in retail environments the champions of their respective businesses, and dealing with specific accounts that they have such as managing a set of relationships both at the store and corporate level at the same time. As I said, we have a SaaS offering. We augment that data science team in two ways—by supporting the platform and by helping with specific consulting services when necessary. There are nine of us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Greg Moran, CEO of OutMatch (Part 1)

Read how Big Data is influencing hiring.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Greg Moran: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of OutMatch. We are a company that provides data analytics around the hiring and development of talent within large organisations primarily in retail, hospitality, and restaurant chains. We basically help organisations identify the patterns associated with great hires and what makes somebody uniquely successful for them. Then, we help them understand how they can screen and develop that person once they’re part of your team.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about the company. Where are you located? What scale of a company are you? Is it a venture-funded company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Mikko Jarva, CTO of Comptel (Part 1)

Here, we discuss Big Data in the telecom industry.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we start with some introduction about yourself as well as your company?

Mikko Jarva: I represent Comptel Intelligence Data business unit as the CTO. Comptel is almost 30 years old. We are traditionally a provider of telco IT. We have launched a new product called Nexterday. Nexterday takes us beyond software and also helps us in telco to move from Big Data towards intelligent data, and move from traditional buying experience towards digital buying experience, and help monetize more.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you represent Comptel’s intelligence work, what does that work entail? What do you do? What kind of Big Data work does Comptel do?
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 1)

Publishers are using Big Data and machine learning to optimize what ads to put in front of their audience. This discussion delves into the depths of that process, and also explores open problems in that world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing you to the audience. Tell us about yourself as well as about PubMatic.

Sri Gopalsamy: I joined recently as the VP Engineering heading the Big Data and machine learning area. I joined the company about two months ago. Andy is one of our co-founders. He has been with the company since the beginning so he has a lot more context around company introduction. My role here is to drive the entire Big Data and real-time data analytics at PubMatic.

I manage a team of Big Data analytics engineers who are building the platform and innovating in the core area of data analytics, natural language processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning. At PubMatic, we view Big Data processing as the key differentiator in helping us grow. I have over 20 years of industry experience. I spend many years in the leadership level with Walmart Global E-commerce. I was heading all of >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 1)

Knowledge management has been around. What has changed? Read on for more discussion on the subject.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Brainspace.

Dave Copps: I’m the CEO of Brainspace. We’re a software company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We built a large-scale machine learning platform that is reinventing the way that companies are learning through their Big Data.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What kind of customers are you trying to cater to? When you say learning, what use cases are we talking about?

Dave Copps: Most of our customers are companies that have large amounts of knowledge workers. The industries we are primarily focused on would be consulting, biotech, technology, oil and gas, and places where there’s a lot of research and knowledge workers. The reason being that our technology has a very unique capability of being able to capture the concepts, thoughts, and ideas and connect the concepts inside of a >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 1)

Real-time, distributed data availability for Big Data use cases is a key issue. Here, we speak with Adam Wray about the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Basho.

Adam Wray: I’ve been raised in companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks. I actually worked for Amazon for several years before starting my own company, but it’s always been in the cloud services space or trying to use some form of what used to be called ASP. I came to Basho via that path with the understanding of what distributed systems mean to your data being moved all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does Basho do? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 1)

MapR has innovated on the Hadoop Open Source building blocks to build a suite of products currently used by hundreds of customers across verticals. This interview double clicks down on some of the use cases, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities in the Big Data field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to MapR. Tell us who you are, what you do, and a bit of your own personal background.

Jack Norris: I’m the CMO at MapR Technologies. MapR is a Big Data leader with its hot-ranked distribution of Hadoop. As part of our offerings, we have the top-ranked Hadoop, top-ranked NoSQL database, and top-ranked SQL on Hadoop solution. We’re helping organizations transform their business and be more effective by being able to better leverage data. We’re seeing companies do that in a way that actually impacts their business as it happens. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 1)

Price personalization has been touted as the holy grail of e-commerce. This conversation brings to light the state of the union in the domain of price optimization, price intelligence, and price personalization.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by setting some context for our audience of what Profitero does and what your background is.

Keith Anderson: Profitero was founded in 2010 in Dublin, Ireland by former IBM and Google software engineers. Sometimes people ask why the company was founded in Ireland and not in Silicon Valley. Dublin has established itself as a European technology hub. Our founders live there. We’re backed by Polaris Partners, which has offices both in Boston as well as in Dublin where we’re headquartered. We now have offices in Dublin, London, Boston, San Diego, Belarus, and Minsk. We’ll shortly open offices in Asia and other parts of Latin America this year. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 1)

Part of big data is exploding data inside of the enterprises. Ed Walsh draws our attention to a specific problem domain: Copy Data Management.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing yourself as well as Catalogic Software so that our audience has a little bit of context about this conversation.

Ed Walsh: I’m the CEO of Catalogic Software. This is my fourth VC-backed CEO engagement. To provide a little history, I was the CEO of a company called Avamar. It’s now a $800 million business inside EMC. The next one was Virtual Iron Software. It was a late stage venture-backed startup providing server virtualization software. The last one is Storwize, which was acquired by IBM. I started my current business about six months ago. It’s a spin-out and its technology is by a company called Catalogic Software. We focused on the overall challenge of copy data management. That might be a new word. It is basically the challenge of enterprise storage infrastructure with data growing 35% year to year. It’s hard to keep up with. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 1)

The dream of digital advertising being 100% measurable and attributable is a myth. In this story, we kick around the issues with Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Damon Ragusa: I’m the Founder and CEO of ThinkVine. My background is in events analytics. I’ve spent a couple of decades in the analytics field primarily supporting strategic marketing objectives across B2B and B2C businesses. ThinkVine is a marketing optimization software and services company. We provide four core capabilities to our customers—software platform for planning marketing, the ability to attribute >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 1)

An end of the year view into what’s happening in the Big Data ecosystem with Eldad Farkash, a veteran of the Business Intelligence world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sisense.

Eldad Farkash: I’m the CTO and Founder of Sisense. Sisense is a Big Data analytics company that bridges the gap between complex models and Big Data clusters with simple business users’ unique needs. The company itself is around 130 people. We have raised around $50 million. We have offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Our R&D team operates from Tel Aviv and sales and management operates in New York. We have 700 customers ranging from huge Internet web companies to government agencies and startups.

Sramana Mitra: What about target customer? Specifically, how do you segment the market and where are you focusing?

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