Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Lars Olrik, Group CEO of Verdande, and Jo Kinsella, CEO of Financial Services of Verdande (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So the infrastructure is there, but the heuristics are different from domain to domain. You kind of have to set these heuristics and rules on top of that.

Lars Olrik: That is correct. That is what I call the 20% to 30% rule.

SM: All right. Let’s go to financial services.

Joanne Kinsella: The biggest challenge that we have seen in financial services is something like outage or performance degradation on a critical trading system will cause downtime. That potentially means a commercial or reputation impact to the bank. Companies like Knight Capital have actually helped us deliver the message to the market – being able to do more with less, so IT and business teams delivering value from the data that already exists in the organization. We are positioning CBR via a monitoring tool you typically see on Wall Street dealing with huge amounts of data across an enormous infrastructure – once something has turned amber or red, a threshold has been breached and something is wrong.

Clients are saying, “We really want to be able to use this data to deliver value. We have to do more with less because we just laid off 10,000 people and we are getting rid of lot of the workforce. When we are downscaling, how can we have an early warning system across critical trading platforms?” That has really been our entry into the big data conversations on Wall Street. We launched into financial services last summer, and we have been working on getting the Verdande name out into the market, talking to lots of people about the platform that we have and how it is different to other tools that are out there. We talked about how can we take enormous amounts of data and make operational teams that support the investment bank in a proactive way, but also how we can be a predictive technology that has decision transparency, can take real-time feeds and isn’t rule based. What this does is provide actionable intelligence in time to stop a business impacting event. That is the value proposition in financial services.

LO: It is fundamentally the same platform that we use across oil & gas and healthcare. It gives the person in the loop better decision-making capabilities and ahead of time – not five minutes, but hours, days and weeks.

SM: I think I have a reasonable idea of what you do and how you do it. I am going to switch gears and ask you for a bit of an industry-level overview. From your standpoint, what is the potential of what you are doing in the various industries and segments that you are working in? Where are open gaps that you would point entrepreneurs to?

LO: Let me put it this way. If you look at oil & gas, the data debate in oil and gas is driven very much about transparency. The governments are requiring the major oil operators to provide better data and transparency on what happens. They can only do that by providing access to data. There is a whole debate on how to use all this data to do the right things. Also, in oil & gas you have a declining knowledge base. Lots of the older people are moving out and younger people are moving in – young people who are bright, intelligent and enthusiastic, but haven’t got the experience. They are being put in situations where they have to make significant capital and operational decisions, decisions that made wrongly can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The only way they can do that is through the transfer of knowledge.

You can either do it in a mentoring way or through the use of technology, which enables a younger and technology-savvy generation to use information better. They are much better equipped to use technology than the 50- or 60-year-olds leaving the industry. What we see is an ever-increasing need for clever and simple information and technology that enables people to do their job smarter and faster. We also see that the old tradition of having people out in the field – on the rigs – which has high risk and safety issues associated with it – those operators are moving their people off and back into base. Therefore, you need good quality technical information which enables them to make better decisions. As you see, this is becoming increasingly prevalent around how to leverage technology.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Lars Olrik, Group CEO of Verdande, and Jo Kinsella, CEO of Financial Services of Verdande
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