Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And these are people who are using online advertising?

Steve Shine: They are all using online advertising. They are not monetizing from membership fees.

SM: I think in general, advertising must be an interesting use case for you. I have talked to several of the players in this space. There is a lot of real-time activity going on, real-time bidding being a very big trend in the online advertising market right now.

SS: Google is the best example in the world for that right now. Its revenue is advertising. Google is a data company, however you want to look at it.

SM: But Google is not the only one. There are a number of ad-tech companies or online advertising companies that use real-time bidding. Real-time bidding is a big use case for the kind of technology you are talking about.

SS: Absolutely. Here is what I love about this industry at the moment and the transformation it is going through: I am constantly amazed at the amount of innovation, creativity, and imagination people are coming up with in terms of how to derive insight and how to do really clever things with data. We use the label “Age of Data.” We are entering the Age of Data, and it is different from the past. In the past, your legacy technology limited you to having a sample. You were statistical by nature. You looked at a certain amount of data and you statistically pointed yourself in a certain direction. That is not good enough now. People want to be able to run the algorithms over all the data. If you do that, you gradually move from stats to facts. That is really important. Everybody is striving for that. When you are bidding for a particular opportunity, your hit rate is so much higher and better targeted as an investment in a dollar to win a customer.

SM: Where do you see open problems in your field that you would point entrepreneurs to?

SS: That is a great question. It is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs today. There is a real change going on in the underlying foundational building blocks of the next generation of data management. Broadly speaking, there are two big ones out there: Hadoop and NoSQL. Those two can be thought of as the foundational building blocks. They are enabling people to look at all their data on a massive scale as more and more data is generated. With that the real entrepreneurial opportunity comes being able to do some of the examples I just went through.

People get really creative about saying the following: If I am a retailer and I am looking at all my point of sale data right down to the minute – who is buying what and in which store? What if I combine that with data on weather around those shops at the time? How does the buying pattern change? What sells more or less depending upon the weather? This sounds simple, but people started to realize that there is a real correlation in certain areas and at certain times. If I was an entrepreneur and I was saying, “Where is the opportunity for me to benefit and to really grow in this big data change that is coming through? There are opportunities for you to build really inventive tools and analytics around combinations of data.” Where is the correlation? What does it reveal? If you can combine that with really strong industry knowledge, the opportunities are enormous.

People don’t realize that Amazon has this. They released the AWS Redshift program. Redshift is Actian’s ParAccel MPP database. It is the fastest-growing cart of Amazon´s AWS business service. It is the cloud data warehouse. People can get to use these powerful engines at a cost point that was prohibitive. If you are an imaginative entrepreneur, you can go out and do big data projects at a price point that was never within your reach before.

SM: I think the real opportunity is to use domain knowledge in various segments of the industry and society and, as you said, use these correlations to provide rich heuristics to make it interesting.

SS: I think some people are so creative in realizing that when you combine macroeconomics with micro details around their own data, they can reveal things that no one has seen before. It is not limited to the giants any longer. It is not limited to massive data science organizations. Smart college kids who are coming out with data science degrees have the tools available to be able to combine themselves with creative people from different industries and come up with entirely new data services that people will pay huge amounts for, because it is transformational.

SM: It has been a real pleasure. I think it is an exciting industry.

SS: We are really excited. We think it is going to be a huge market opportunity for everybody. We are at the forefront of providing those new platform capabilities.

SM: Thank you.

SS: Goodbye.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian
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