Thought Leaders in Big Data: Instaclustr CEO Peter Nichol (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In this general universe that you’re operating in, where do you see open problems? If you were starting a company today, where would you look into?

Peter Nichol: That’s a great question. I would say there’re probably two areas that are big trends emerging in the future that haven’t been addressed in a meaningful way. We’ve seen the movement of a lot of companies to the cloud. I think the next trend would be companies looking for cloud independence.

In other words, a lot of companies have moved to AWS, for example. That’s the biggest cloud provider out there. Companies are now going to be starting to look for independence. In other words, they don’t want to be locked in to a specific cloud provider. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Instaclustr CEO Peter Nichol (Part 1)

Peter provides some excellent insights into open problems around which new entrepreneurs can build companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Instaclustr to our audience.

Peter Nichol: I’m the CEO of Instaclustr. I’ve been CEO and various other positions in the technology industry for nearly 30 years. I’m based in Silicon Valley. Instaclustr is a company that was founded in Australia in 2013 about four years ago. We focus on providing Database-as-a-Service to our customers with a specific focus on not just open source technology starting with Cassandra but >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 4)

Tim Prendergast: Companies are drowning in data nowadays. You see this heavy push into machine learning and AI to try and rationalize this data. The goal is correct. However, I think the approach is slightly off. New entrepreneurs are looking at this problem of data overload. We need to approach it from a methodology where we say, “Humans are the curators of the data but are not the decision makers.” We should find ways where we can augment small to medium sized teams with technology to help them answer deep questions about this data without having to have large engineering forces or large data science teams. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers are particularly resonating with your value proposition?

Tim Prendergast: The unique thing about us is, coming from being practitioners first, we are able to understand the problems that anyone going to use the cloud is going to have. In fact, the beauty of a standardized API platform like an Amazon or Azure is that whether you’re a two-person startup or you’re a company with 20,000 engineers, >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s click down into the process and talk about what it is that you’re doing for these customers.

Tim Prendergast: If you think about what cloud really is, cloud is programmatically defined infrastructure and services. Instead of people having to sit and click buttons and work through UIs of products, >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 1)

Tim discusses cloud security challenges in this short conversation.

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

Tim Prendergast: I’m a long-time information security practitioner and one of the early cloud computing adopters. My history goes way back to the early days of PGP encryption and more recently before I started Evident.io, I was one of the principal architects of Adobe.

My focus was on the cloud computing side of the house and transforming that company from someone who had user experiences >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. In your space, what are the trends and what are some open problems that you would point new entrepreneurs to look into?

Mike Laven: If you send a million dollars from San Francisco to New York, it’s a far simpler exercise than sending a thousand dollars from San Francisco to France. The world of moving money around the world is massively compliance and regulation intensive. There are rules about the kinds of information we have to collect about who’s sending the money and who’s receiving the funds and report it to authorities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 2)

Mike Laven: We effectively provide our customers a one-stop connection to a global banking world. It’s very difficult to find a single bank that optimizes everything for you. Different banks and different payment providers have different strengths. Some are good in Asia. Some are good in Latin America.

Different currency providers have different strengths based on the volume of what they do. Effectively, you connect to us and we handle all of that for you. From the perspective of your business, you’re making your international payments at roughly the same level of difficulty as your domestic payments. >>>