Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ashish Sharma, Principal at Axtria (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at penetration of these kinds of sensor-driven Big Data applications, how many hospitals are adopting stuff like that? What is the market penetration?

Ashish Sharma: I don’t have any tangible data that I can comment on. If I’m speaking at certain conferences, I run into people who are involved with some early stage discoveries around these. If I were to compare Q2 of 2016 versus Q2 of 2017, I’m seeing a 30% to 40% uptake on those discoveries, topic discussions, and research studies being published. That suggests that there is definite increase in that market.

The other thing that I’m seeing is that pharmaceutical companies may not necessarily have humongous amounts of data but they do have a very diverse set of data. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of success. Let’s say the marketing division is consuming very diverse datasets coming from different digital campaigns and partners. Each agency will send data in a very different format.

The data itself requires some kind of transformation. They all belong to a study that an analyst needs to perform to be able to publish any impact on the outcome of those campaigns. To be able to do that, there’s a need for creating a modern data warehouse that can consume all these different datasets. They are so diverse that there is a need to bring all of them in one place. That’s one.

Once that part is achieved, there’s still a huge dependency on IT organizations and data engineering organizations by this analyst community. That’s where we’re seeing major success for Axtria because we understand the domain. We understand the data. We understand the distributed data infrastructure so well that we are able to combine the three and be able to deliver an efficient and smart data lake to our customers.

We have dramatically reduced the analyst community’s dependency on IT. Otherwise pharmaceuticals are forced to hire data scientists who are savvy data engineers. That is a major success where data preparation time is reduced from weeks to minutes.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? In this penetration that you’re seeing, is there any geographic bias?

Ashish Sharma: When it comes to pharmaceutical, US is leading.

Sramana Mitra: I’m talking about within the US.

Ashish Sharma: Within the US, the major concentration is on the East Coast. New Jersey is a big hub. We also have a fair share of pharma companies on the West Coast as well. We have a huge presence in New Jersey where we are headquartered. That is quite strategic to how these pharmaceutical companies are concentrated.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ashish Sharma, Principal at Axtria
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