Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Patrick Taylor, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this something that companies go out and look for? Is it something that all large MNCs put in place – some sort of fraud monitoring systems?

Patrick Taylor: They don’t all have one in place now.

SM: So your customers are all large MNCs?

PT: Our customers are mostly large Fortune 1000 government agency type organizations. Not all of it is fraud, though. Many are record reconciliation. We do those kinds of problems for a number of companies as well. Often the Fraud and Corrupt Practices Act is in play, but sometimes it isn’t exactly fraud, it is inappropriate behavior.

I will give you another example where we applied the same evidence-based approach on the opportunity side. This is where we are looking at a company that sells a wide variety of supplies to other companies that use them as part of an overall work process – the biotech industry, for example. If I am dealing with a particular project, there is a kind of sequencing that a person will go through. They might go ahead and order the first four products, run away from you, and depending on how the experiments go, they may need to order products five and six, etc. What makes this complicated is that there are a lot of people who are selling to this company. For me, to even know that it is going to a particular pharmaceutical company is to deduce the address. What you want to pull out of that are the places where you are missing a chance to sell some of the commodities. We look at procurement, sequences, what is happening, and then try to identify spots where it looks like we are missing a chance to sell a particular reagent at company ABC, and the most likely person to call is Fred, for example.

SM: But the ecosystem is much more competitive. There are lots of players in that spot. There are lots of people who provide analytics solutions on the sales and marketing side. I think what you described on the fraud and anomaly detection side is really cool.

PT: In particular the marketing side is really complex. We [went] a little less on the product cross-selling side. I think it gets more complex in situations like the one I just described. We have seen that as a little less competitive.

SM: If I were you – from a business strategy point of view with your company – I would stick to the place where you have something very unique and differentiated as opposed to going and try to nudge your way into a market that is much more noisy and crowded.

PT: The interesting things that have happened to us over the years are the problems that people apply us to. There is a core part of our company that is a platform – product as a platform. It is Java coded and knows how to acquire data, analyze it and apply multi-dimensional analytics and then drives action. Those are all configured with XML files that tell it where to go get the particular data from, what kind of ontology to stick it in, etc. There are two technical resources we have. One is the guys who writes the platform, and the second is the people who have the domain expertise that helps us write out the analytics. I agree with you.

We have gotten pretty good at bribery, fraud and looking at payments analytics. Our platform is built for a particular kind of analytic activity – one that happens continuously, one that look a lot at data sources, etc. Once people get the hang of what we do – if you have the domain expertise like in the customer representative’s example – someone with domain expertise is able to attack a unique problem. There are the things where we have out-of-the-box analytics and knowledge, on our platform and those are the completed solutions we sell. Then there are the interesting and different cases where someone else with domain expertise takes us. The more you go into different markets, the more you have to know how to talk the talk.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Patrick Taylor, CEO of Oversight Systems
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