Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 1)

David discussed IoT in the context of SAP customers, and also points out open problems that entrepreneurs can work on. Very interesting discussion on the nuances of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you to our audience. What is your role at SAP? Where do you come from? What kind of background and perspective do we have here?

David Parker: I’m a Global Senior Executive at SAP responsible for Big Data and Internet of Things go-to-market, which revolves around supporting customer interactions, deciding our partner ecosystem and strategy, and more importantly, helping customers transform and re-imagine their business to come up with new business models. In terms of my background, I’ve been in the industry for the better part of 35 plus years. I started out in financial services. In more recent times, I’ve been in other industries such as oil and gas, mining, utilities, pharma, retail, etc. As you know, we focus on over 24 different industries. My role is to work with executives, understand their current state, and advise them on what the future state looks like, both from an industry perspective and more importantly, how they can leverage their SAP footprint or non-SAP footprint to build out new business outcomes and decisions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to ask you a specific question about the crossover between media and e-commerce. Let’s take the example of Mail Online for instance. This is a very big lifestyle publisher. Are you familiar with them?

Sri Gopalsamy: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This is a big lifestyle site. They have hundreds of millions of users. I would say that the biggest category where they would be able to monetize is in lifestyle. I would say Vogue would fall into this category. In general, lifestyle media has a lot of impressions out there. There’s a huge inventory of impressions that is lifestyle content. Do you do anything to tie lifestyle content directly into commerce?

Anand Das: It depends upon the publishers and their business policies. We do help them do that. We don’t do it on their behalf, but we do integrate into their systems that they use to actually give them insights that will allow them to bucket users into interesting categories. The other thing is whenever you deal with e-commerce, the challenge for any company which does sales and ads is >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: ZScaler Takes Security to the Cloud

According to a market report published by Transparency Market Research, the global cloud security market is projected to grow from $4.5 billion in 2014 to $12 billion by the year 2022. That translates to an impressive 12.8% annual growth rate. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member ZScaler is playing a key role in this rapidly growing industry.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Apttus Ready for IPO

According to a Forrester report, the public cloud market is expected to reach $191 billion by 2020, from $58 billion in 2013. Cloud applications, projected at $133 billion in 2020, are leading this growth; cloud platforms will generate $44 billion in revenue by 2020; and cloud business services will come in at $14 billion. Billion Dollar Unicorn Apttus is one of the many startups to benefit from the growth in the cloud applications market. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 4)

Dave Copps: Customers are primarily using Discovery Five for e-discovery and litigation support. When companies are taken to court and there are tens of millions of case documents, they use Brainspace Discovery Five to build a brain on those case documents. That product is interesting. I’d like to call it augmented intelligence. We built it in a way that Brainspace can do a lot of the heavy lifting that people can’t do. A person can’t possibly read 10 million documents and remember how every word is related to every other word. Brainspace can do that.

We give people the ability to use Brainspace, interact with Brainspace and see the concepts and ideas that Brainspace is relating to your query. The other product is Brainspace Enterprise. That product is launching in three weeks. We have two very large Fortune 10 beta customers. I can’t tell you who they are. The idea behind Brainspace Enterprise is we want to turn the social curation of documents inside of a company into a brain. As people are curating, collecting, and sharing documents, Brainspace is learning from that curation, and forming those documents into an asset that literally every person in the company can now engage to connect with other people and documents. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 3)

Dave Copps: I heard a term the other day called feral knowledge. How do we start to tame the wild? How can we find answers in that large environment? It’s a lot different from what you’re talking about for sure. If you have a simple environment, that’s a very good environment to use a keyword search. The minute you go beyond that, it doesn’t work anymore. We’ve taken a very different approach. Brainspace formed a collective intelligence from an enterprise’s documents.

We’ll take the tens of millions of documents that a company has. We read them and connect the concepts inside those documents into a multi-dimensional space. Before anyone ever pushes a search button, we’ve connected the concepts inside that data. Now, when you enter a search, it’s not just looking for that word. It’s actually connecting that word to all the other words and phrases that could be related to it, and then connecting you with documents that have a similar concept. It’s a much different scenario. I agree with you that when there’s simple applications that have a known set of answers, that’s a great place for keyword search. We don’t play too much in those areas. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about adoption. The concepts and the ideas that you’re talking about have been around. After doing three startups, I did 10 years of consulting before I started One Million by One Million. Even in the early 2000’s, there were companies that called themselves knowledge management companies that did exactly what you’re doing with exactly the same value proposition. They had a very hard time gaining enterprise adoption. What is happening now? What is the state of the union in enterprise adoption today with your technology?

Dave Copps: I think you’re seeing a real transformation happening. I’ve been in the space a long time too. I think knowledge management is a term that has been around for a very long time. I don’t think anyone knows what it means anymore. In essence, knowledge management in the past meant search. Every search engine called themselves a knowledge management system. I think the concept of search is dated. If you think about the way search works, someone puts in a keyword and that keyword is then matched to every document that might have that keyword, and they bring back all the documents. That whole strategy is dying. We can’t have as much data as we have today without some kind of a learning system. The state of the art system can’t be putting all the documents in a Big Data index and hack at it with keywords. We’ve done very static methods for connecting people with knowledge. >>>

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 >>>