Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any financing in the early phase of your company? Adriaan van Wyck: When we started to become successful in Asia and in the U.S. – Merrill Lynch and Intel were early customers – the company was growing at a pace the three individuals couldn’t keep up with. We took some
Sramana Mitra: What is the segmentation? When you are looking for customers, where are you looking? Adriaan van Wyck: That is a very challenging question for us to answer right now. If you think about what I just said, it applies to almost every organization out there. It is a discipline we have to think
Sramana Mitra: Does that position you in the integration layer? Adriaan van Wyck: It positions us in the layer right on top of the integration layer. If you think about the integration layer as being the concrete floors within a building, we are the hardwood floors that sit right on top of it.
Sramana Mitra: You said Kimberly-Clark has developed 400 applications in a year on top of your big data platform. Talk to us about what the platform consists of, what data sources they are drawing from and what the types of applications are. Adriaan van Wyck: Let’s talk about the role we play within the concept
Adriaan van Wyk is the chief executive officer of K2, a company that helps business customers make sense of big data analytics in order to make business decisions. The company started off in South Africa and through the years managed to create a global footprint with partners in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. In this
Sramana Mitra: You are saying that the number and complexity of input variables are going to go up, creating greater accuracy. Saed Syad: Yes. If you have more variables, you have a chance to better understand the problem. But at the same time, traditional modeling can not support this type of change because of the
Sramana Mitra: So your system sits in between the advertiser and the different publisher venues into which you are placing those ads? Saed Syad: The publisher is on the other side. We are on the side of advertisers.
Sramana Mitra: One common experience I find myself having often is that I go to a website that I use to keep track of theaters, for example. Then I buy tickets to a particular show. But there is some sort of a re-targeting algorithm that has picked up that I was interested in this show