Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 1)

There’s a significant trend in the cloud services space towards managed services. Read on to learn more.

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

Ali Din: I run a company by the name of dinCloud, which is a cloud services provider. I’ve been in the IT channel or IT industry for just shy of 20 years now. I’ve been in implementation roles, product development, marketing, brand management, and am now overseeing dinCloud. The company has been incubated out of an IT value-added reseller that was close to about $1 billion in revenue.

The founder of dinCloud had also founded that reseller, so he had been in the industry for a number of years as well. We initially started out as a desktop-as-a-service provider because there were a lot of opportunities around taking the physical desktop and the evolution of that into a virtual mode. We were already seeing this happen in the server space around 2010 and 2011. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 1)

The recruiting approach in large companies that hire large numbers in a given year is changing. Read on, to learn how cloud and video are becoming central to the current trends.

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

Kurt Heikkinen: I’m the President and CEO of Montage. Personally, I have a few decades of experience in innovation inside of human capital management. Our company Montage is a leading provider of purpose-built video and voice interviewing technology that transforms the hiring process. We work with many large organizations to help them gain a hiring advantage using our solutions that are specifically tailored to support the complex requirements of recruiting and hiring. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 5)

Amir Husain: Within our own area of cyber security, one of the things that’s happening at the large-scale level is that cyber security is being weaponized. This is very sad but it’s true. Cyber security is now becoming a weapon of warfare. You’ve seen where digital weaponry was used to rollback the Iranian nuclear program by almost two years. In that two-year period, space was created for a negotiated diplomatic solution to a crisis which, otherwise, would have resulted in a shooting war. God knows how many unknown examples that are not in the public domain exist.

Lately, there has also been an attack on the Ukrainian power grid. At the end of the day, nobody disputes the fact that that was a cyber attack. It brought 200,000 individuals off the power grid. These are large-scale attacks now and this is happening in the real world. The consequences and chances of digital threat resulting in actual physical damage are increasing.

They’re also becoming much more diverse. There’s already 500,000 cars in the US that could be remotely hacked. As they’re going down the highway at 70 miles an hour, you can call them to turn left or right. With self-driving cars, that will be taken to a whole different level. As this burgeoning industrial Internet >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about the specifics of Greenwave. Where are you doing this company from? Where are you based? What are the specifics of the company?

Martin Manniche: We started the company up front. We saw that there was a need for us to innovate in a different way and build this big managed services platform. We like to say that we are headquartered in one location, but we really see ourselves as a company with diversity and focused on being a global company. As I said, we are US-headquartered out of Irvine, California. We are European-headquartered at Copenhagen.

We are, today, around 250 employees worldwide. We have, over the last three years, doubled revenues year over year. We are very profitable. We have seen massive growth within the last three years. The company is seven years old but the first four years was hard. We grew but we didn’t grow the pace we’ve done over the last three years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 4)

Amir Husain: There are lots of examples where we found binaries that were not registering on any one of the 60 different anti-virus engines and yet our machine learning anti-virus capability gave them threat rating as high as 80%. As we actually investigated the envelope manually, we discovered that there was an embedded threat, and that it was a mutation. Therefore, a signature-based system was not able to catch it. There’s lots of these examples. Now, we’re also starting to see in the cyber-physical domain where you have large physical systems where both natural problems as well as potential cyber threats can be tracked and discovered before they can cause any damage.

Sramana Mitra: Can we get to the last segment where the question is essentially, what is your view of emerging trends in the industry and open problems?

Amir Husain: I’ll first take a higher-level view above cyber security for a moment. One of the things that’s happening that is very revolutionary right now is >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 4)

Martin Manniche: I also think that the most intuitive way of controlling things is not with having a Swiss Army knife of applications. How many of you don’t have a smartphone with way too many applications where 85% of them are most likely never used? The most intuitive way of controlling things is using your voice for control. I am very confident that voice control will be the driving force that will allow fast adoption of everything. Smart home or home security is not new. It’s been there for many years but it has not really grown. It’s been very stable with slow growth.

If we want massive growth, find a way that is intuitive. The most intuitive and easiest way where people are not taking out their phones or a remote control is using your voice as a way to control. I believe voice control is a game changer in the industry. I hope that a lot of companies will start new >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question in that context. There’s a lot of processing going on midstream of traffic coming in. Is it all happening in real time? How do you deal with delays and latencies?

Amir Husain: First of all, we’re not blocking things until the final answer arrives. In other words, we’re not inserting ourselves as a delay in the servicing of whatever requests our clients or customers are looking to service. All this data exhaust is going into our system and there’s a growing level of confidence being built up as deeper and deeper research is happening. You clearly don’t want to go to real-time NLP research query while you’re waiting on the customer to get their web page back.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right.

Amir Husain: We can do a lot of stuff in real-time, which is quicker. It might be knowledge that we have learned that we can apply. Still, there are things that might look fishy while you may continue to do what the system would have done as long as the action falls in the range of things >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take one of your customers and double-click down. In that use case, what I’d like to understand is where is the traffic being intercepted, how is it being modelled, what parameters is it being modelled against, and what is the nature of the AI algorithm driving this kind of predictive modelling.

Amir Husain: Just zooming out, let me first tell you how we deal with customers and what we provide specifically. We have a product called Spark Secure. Spark Secure can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise. It’s delivered through a hybrid model. Spark Secure can ingest many forms of data. One of those might be, for example, proxy logs or firewall logs.

It looks through that semi-structured information. It can also look at binaries. It can also read articles and texts and textual description of security threats on the web. All of that data is used and fused together by these algorithms to build models of what constitute a threat. Not only is that threat detection capability >>>