Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give an example of something that was not possible for a salesperson to do before you introduced your product into the process?

John Rauscher: Let’s take an example of a financial adviser in a retail bank branch. Customers enter from time to time. You go to your bank and look for a financial adviser. You’re going to sit in front of him. The banker is going to secure your ID and account number. He’s going to connect to your data and see in front of him hundreds of data. He cannot understand the data immediately because it takes time to analyze the data. What we are going to do is immediately provide information instead of just data. Information like the customer has been with the bank for 15 years or the customer deserves preferred client status but has not applied for it. The customer actually bought a car last month and that explains why balance is very low this month. You will receive information that is very difficult to see from the data. Yseop is going to analyze the data. >>>

Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What role did you play in this company? There were other people who co-founded the company and you came in later?

John Rauscher: Yes, I came in as the COO. Then, I became the CEO of the company.

Sramana Mitra: When the company was sold to Oracle, you were running the company?

John Rauscher: Yes, I was running the company. I negotiated the deal with Oracle as the CEO of the company. It was a six-month process. It was a good experience. I didn’t regret it even though I wasn’t a major stockholder. The decision to approve the transaction with Oracle came from the board. I was a stockholder of the company but not a major stockholder. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 1)

Social media is dramatically changing sales and marketing. In this interview, we double-click down on the insurance and financial advisory sales functions. Clara Shih guides us through the developments in this field, as well as offers suggestions for new venture opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as to Hearsay Social.

Clara Shih: I’m the CEO and Founder of Hearsay Social. We’re a 200-person enterprise software company based in San Francisco with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Sramana Mitra: What is Hearsay’s primary business?
>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think we understand what you’re doing and what’s happening in this emerging trend of having to manage this copy data. You’ve been in the space. You’ve done other companies in the data management space. What is your observation from an industry-level perspective? What are the trends? What are the open problems?

Ed Walsh: Obviously, there’s a reason I chose to do Catalogic. I think it fills a big void there. In general, there’s a $38 billion storage business that helps people build private clouds. People are trying to build their own environments inside their four walls. They are trying to have cloud economics that are similar to what people are doing in the public cloud, but they’re stuck with some old processes that makes them almost impossible to keep up with economics—the way we backup and replicate, and the way we protect our environment. In a typical enterprise, you >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the pricing around this? What kind of dollars are enterprises willing to pay for solving this problem?

Ed Walsh: It’s about a $6 billion software market.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re selling your software, how much are people willing to pay to address this issue?

Ed Walsh: Price of a three-year storage controller is around $5,000 per controller. Average sales price today is $35,000. We expect that to go up to about $200,000. We have 12 paying clients. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There’s no venture capital involved in the first round?

Ed Walsh: No, it was a spin-out. It was management and some existing board members.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re in the process of raising your first institutional round right now?

Ed Walsh: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the product and the area in general. Let me ask a dumb question here. What are we trying to do with this copy data? Are we trying to keep track of how many copies there are? What is the goal of the copy data field?
>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 2)

Ed Walsh: The next use-case is next-generation data protection, which results in tremendous savings just by changing the way enterprises protect their storage and make it more like what people do in a public cloud. So, not only is it saving a lot of dollars, but it is also simultaneously giving them dramatically better recovery. The third use case is for hybrid cloud. Why would enterprises want to use a hybrid cloud when they have their own private cloud? Why would they want to use and put storage out into a hybrid cloud using a piece of the public cloud? It’s not to store the data. It’s to leverage compute. Use a copy of what they have inside the four walls but spin up a thousand Hadoop nodes and use that capacity and spin it down without using it while paying only for what they have. It gives them scale and also economies closer to what people are doing in the public cloud and the flexibility to use that hybrid cloud. Last but not the least is copy data analytics. It’s trying to understand what  >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 1)

Part of big data is exploding data inside of the enterprises. Ed Walsh draws our attention to a specific problem domain: Copy Data Management.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing yourself as well as Catalogic Software so that our audience has a little bit of context about this conversation.

Ed Walsh: I’m the CEO of Catalogic Software. This is my fourth VC-backed CEO engagement. To provide a little history, I was the CEO of a company called Avamar. It’s now a $800 million business inside EMC. The next one was Virtual Iron Software. It was a late stage venture-backed startup providing server virtualization software. The last one is Storwize, which was acquired by IBM. I started my current business about six months ago. It’s a spin-out and its technology is by a company called Catalogic Software. We focused on the overall challenge of copy data management. That might be a new word. It is basically the challenge of enterprise storage infrastructure with data growing 35% year to year. It’s hard to keep up with. >>>