Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 5)

Sai Gundavelli: From a technology perspective, I always ask the question, “Why Solix?” Why would any customer buy from us? I focused a lot on that. I focused on engineering. That was the first thing from a technology perspective. We wanted to be a price leader. We’ll make it easy for customers to acquire our solution. We provide a subscription-based pricing. We had a perpetual license based pricing. The third was we were focused on happy customers. With every implementation, we try very hard to make them a happy customer.

Sramana Mitra: This sounds very qualitative. I tend to see situations where small companies compete with a lot of competitors especially when they’re competing with competitors with deep pocket channels. One way people do that is by being able to do something that these larger competitors are not able to do. What was that? I’m sure those guys are also saying we provide great support. We provide great user experience. It’s very hard to sell on that message. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you bring in the first financing? Walk me through the financing history of the company.

Sai Gundavelli: As I was building the company, I was also looking for funds, but I didn’t want to go through the VC route. One of my good friends heard the story and he introduced me to one of his doctor friends in Los Angeles. I presented my story. He liked my story and immediately wrote me a check for $1 million. Then there is a company back in India where I’m an investor too. That also provided me some funding. That gave me the initial support for building the organization.

Sramana Mitra: How much money in total have you raised from angels?

Sai Gundavelli: I would say it would be close to $8 million. We run the organization very lean and mean. I’m a >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the killer app for what you were offering? Where did you find traction in the enterprise? What part of the enterprise was looking for this kind of enhanced search capabilities?

Sai Gundavelli: That’s a good question. A lot of enterprises had implemented Oracle applications, using which their data started to grow and their backups were taking a longer time. Planning for disaster recovery was also becoming tougher. Oracle also charges based on the CPU utilization. If the company has got 10 years of data and if they’re processing it, they obviously need more CPU. The more CPU you have, the more software licenses you pay. You’re still processing data from 10 years back and you’re still putting the entire data set on the same storage. Our killer app helps archive the data. You put all your active and usable items in the living room. The items that you don’t use that frequently, you put in the garage. That was the value proposition. That’s how we built the technology in terms of how to optimize their application data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have some sort of a program where you invite or encourage entrepreneurs to build on top of the MapR platform?

Jack Norris: According to industry analysts like Gartner, the knowledge acquisition for Hadoop is the biggest hurdle for adoption. That’s an area that we’ve really invested heavily in. Just last quarter, we’ve introduced free on-demand Hadoop training. There are separate tracks for developers, administrators, and analysts with multiple classes in each track. It can lead to full certification. The focus there is getting people knowledgeable about Hadoop. What are the use cases? What can you do? That’s been incredibly well-received. We’ve had over 20,000 enrollees in less than a quarter. That’s one area where people can start and try to understand the potential. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For the last set of questions, I’d like you to put on an industry thought leader hat. What trends do you see in the market as it pertains to where you are operating? What’s coming out on the horizon? What are you anticipating? What are some open problems as it pertains to those trends? Where do you encourage new entrepreneurs to look for new business opportunities?

Jack Norris: First of all, you have to take a step back and look at the context in which these Hadoop innovations are happening. Let’s look at the data center today and how it’s changing. We’re in the middle of the biggest re-platforming of the enterprise. It’s really challenging a lot of the assumptions that dictate how data is organized and treated today. You have a separate storage network for computing, a separate production system, and separate analytic silos that separate, not only in terms of systems, but also in terms of time where it takes at least a day to get the data over into the analytics system. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to synthesize some of the top use cases, it sounds like you have a mission-critical use case in retail and other kinds of Internet applications. Could you double-click on that and outline some of the mission-critical use cases?

Jack Norris: If you look at how organizations are using it, Hadoop is a journey. Typically, it might start out as a cluster that’s used to support data scientist to do some analysis to better understand some aspects of the business. It tends to rapidly move into more of the application space where it takes production data and integrates analytics and processes them together.

There’s over 50 different use cases in a single customer. 18% of our customers have 50 or more use cases running on a single cluster. It can be quite diverse not only across customers, but even within a customer. Some of those relate to top line. How do they roll out new products and >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What does MapR sell?

Jack Norris: We’re a software company. We’re providing the distribution so that organizations can leverage this and impact their business.

Sramana Mitra: You’re selling software on top of Hadoop? Is this an application on top of Hadoop?

Jack Norris: Hadoop is not just a single thing. It’s a series of components – Sqoop, Oozie, Flume. All of them have different names. It sits on top of the Hadoop distributed file system that accesses a persistent store for the data. That Hadoop distributed file system has a Java component that uses Linux file system. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 1)

MapR has innovated on the Hadoop Open Source building blocks to build a suite of products currently used by hundreds of customers across verticals. This interview double clicks down on some of the use cases, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities in the Big Data field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to MapR. Tell us who you are, what you do, and a bit of your own personal background.

Jack Norris: I’m the CMO at MapR Technologies. MapR is a Big Data leader with its hot-ranked distribution of Hadoop. As part of our offerings, we have the top-ranked Hadoop, top-ranked NoSQL database, and top-ranked SQL on Hadoop solution. We’re helping organizations transform their business and be more effective by being able to better leverage data. We’re seeing companies do that in a way that actually impacts their business as it happens. >>>