Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 1)

How far are we from software making decisions based on Big Data rather than human data scientists having to make those decisions? Let’s see what Frank Bien, CEO of Looker, has to say.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing Looker and yourself. Tell us what you do. What’s the company all about?

Frank Bien: I’m the CEO of Looker. Looker is a new kind of data analytics and business intelligence solution that really provides end users a new level of exploration capabilities on top of very large and complex sets of data.

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers are you going after?
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 1)

Big Data is all very well, but typically, the databases are full of dirty data. Before you can analyze accurately, you have to cleanse the data. Paxata has great insights to offer into the process.

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

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Paxata is an early-stage startup company. We were founded in early 2012 by four people–our CEO Prakash Nanduri, CTO Dave Brewster, Chris Maddox who runs all of our alliances and channel partners, and myself as the Head of Products. We are all enterprise software guys. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 1)

Big Data platforms like Hortonworks and Cloudera use a third party player to address security issues. Protegrity offers one of those key building blocks of a secure Big Data platform. This interview delves into the security issues that customers are grappling with.

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

Ulf Mattsson: I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Protegrity. A little bit about my background, I worked for 20 years at IBM in software development and database security. I left IBM over a decade ago to design the Protegrity database security product and

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10 Thought Leaders in Big Data

We have a long-running Thought Leaders in Big Data series on the 1M/1M blog. We started publishing the series back in 2012. Over the last couple of years, we have featured many of the innovators in the field. Of those, today, I will introduce you to ten who I think would be interesting for you to get to know.

Let me explain why I have chosen these ones in particular.

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

Today, 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.
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Atanas Kiryakov, CEO of Ontotext (Part 1)

Semantic technologies are gaining ground in the world of Big Data. This interview focuses on some applications in various parts of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing the audience to Ontotext. Tell us who you are, where you’re based, and what kind of work you are doing.

Atanas Kiryakov: I founded Ontotext in the year 2000. We were one of the leading sites globally for artificial intelligence in the 80s through the 90s. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Steve Bryan, CEO of Vigillo (Part 1)

I am a big fan of niche Big Data applications. Here’s one focused on the trucking industry!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself as well as Vigillo.

Steve Bryan: The Latin word vigillo means vigilant. That is the backbone of what we do for our customers. We are just past our seventh year in business. I founded the company in 2007. Essentially, what we do is help trucking companies manage the vast amounts of data that are generated by and collected about them and their operations. We deal mostly with the trucking companies that operate the large 18-wheeler commercial motor vehicles that haul the nation’s freight up and down the nation’s highways. We have several thousands of them who subscribe to various analytics and reporting services that we offer to the industry. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Charlie Lougheed, Co-Founder and President of Explorys (Part 1)

In our review of various Big Data players working on vertical apps, this time, we bring you a Healthcare IT story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introductions. Please talk a little bit about yourself as well as Explorys.

Charlie Lougheed: Explorys is my third company. I was in my mid-teens when I started my first one. I was always driven to technology and entrepreneurship. I have this strange hybrid of experience in that I’ve spent a good amount of my career in large corporations as well. I’ve spent a good amount of time in the financial services sector, primarily around extending their online channel. I was responsible for both the technology as well as the business side. It was an interesting exposure. To some >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 1)

Today, social behavior and transaction data are seldom correlated to fully understand the social graph of customers that can lead to business strategy decisions like special handling of key influencers. While social media offers some insights into key influencers, such correlation with transactional data and behavioral data would take that to the next level.

Read this discussion with Dmitri Williams to understand where we’re going.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to you and give some context about what vantage point you’re looking at the Big Data world from.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 1)

Everyone in Big Data is anticipating the Internet of Things trend. Don discusses it as well, along with other issues.

Sramana Mitra: Don, let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Infobright.

Don DeLoach: I’m the President and CEO of Infobright. Infobright is a company that offers a purpose-built platform for storing and analyzing machine-generated data. If you had to classify us, it would be the column-based analytic database. There’s a number of clever offerings that I have a high respect for. We are not of the belief that there’s one silver bullet and nobody else does anything good. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 1)

More commentary on how Big Data’s rise leads to massive automation, productivity growth, and elimination of jobs! Exciting technology trends, scary human society predictions.

Sramana Mitra: Radhika, let’s introduce our audience to yourself. Tell us a little bit about you and how you got to Emcien.

Radhika Subramanian: My name is Radhika Subramanian. I am the CEO of Emcien. Emcien’s product is automated analytics for Big Data. Having said that, let me take a step back and let me tell you about me. I am from India and I’m an engineer. My undergraduate degree was Electronic Engineering. I came to Georgia Tech and did my masters in Industrial Engineering. I ended up starting my first company completely by mistake because I was in the computational group at Georgia Tech. This is way before Big Data became sexy.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity (Part 1)

This discussion is about how Attensity is using unstructured data analysis to prevent churn in customer bases of Telecom, Consumer Electronics, and other verticals.

Sramana Mitra: Howard, let’s start with introducing our audience to Attensity. Tell us what the company does. Also give us some of your background.

Howard Lau: Thank you for this opportunity. Attensity is a Big Data company. The value that we bring is we ingest a tremendous amount of data. With the advent of social networking, a lot of the volume of this data that we ingest is obviously social data. It includes Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. As you know, Twitter has exploded onto the scene. At this point, it generates about 500 million tweets per day. We ingest that information into our system and then we analyze that information so that we can do query analysis based on topics defined by our customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Joe Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup (Part 1)

Machines replacing humans. Similar to what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfson point out in their article on the decoupling of productivity and job growth, Joe Shamir sheds some light on this trend of process automation within businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Joe, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to ToolsGroup.

Joe Shamir: I’m Joe Shamir. I’m one of the founders of ToolsGroup. ToolsGroup has been operating in supply chain modeling, planning, and optimization for the last 20 years. We’ve achieved quite a deep coverage in terms of excellence in certain areas of the supply chain. We are currently serving 250 customers spanning all continents in about 32 countries.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 1)

Like most areas of IT, DevOps is going through its own reinvention through the intervention of Big Data. Let’s take a look.

Sramana Mitra: Vance, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Sumo Logic.

Vance Loiselle: Just a quick background on myself. I’ve been in IT for the last 20 years. I started in consulting at Accenture. I was a co-founder of a company in the data center automation space called BladeLogic. In the last decade, I saw first-hand a lot organizations trying to figure out how to automate a lot of the tasks and analysis that they have to do with their IT and applications investments. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 1)

We have two interesting discussions in this interview with Naveen: one about Big Data and a second one about Corporate Incubation. As you know, in 1M/1M, we’re working on Corporate Incubation quite extensively. Naveen throws light on Xerox’s strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Naveen, let’s start with a bit of your background and also by setting the context of the old Xerox versus the new Xerox.

Naveen Sharma: First of all, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Naveen Sharma. I have a dual role in Xerox. I manage a resource lab in one of Xerox’s innovation center, which is in Webster, New York. Concurrently, I also have a role as the Chief Innovation Officer, Xerox Retail. As part of my Chief Innovation Officer role, I’m tasked to develop and deliver new innovations that can eventually become new Xerox services. Most people would associate Xerox with printing services, but over fifty percent of our revenue now comes from services. It’s an area that is growing as we take a vertical approach.We are looking to bring some innovations in retail IT, as well as IT applied to some of the specific domains, such as industrial, hospitality, or media.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Mike Byers, CEO of HighRoads (Part 1)

Mike Byers is the chief executive officer of HighRoads, a company that helps its clients with benefits plan management and healthcare compliance through its cloud-based SaaS offering. Mike has studied at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management and has more than 30 years of experience in finance and software. In this interview he describes HighRoads’ value proposition in the benefits and healthcare space and gives us a few interesting use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Mike, let´s start with introducing you as well as HighRoads to our audience.

Mike Byers: Thank you for the interview. I appreciate the opportunity. My background is an almost 30-year career that started in finance as a CPA. >>>