Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You founded it in 2012. We are now in 2014. How much adoption have you had following your methodology and in what segment? Where are you finding the sweet spot of your adoption?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: I’m not at liberty to share the exact customer numbers, but we’re above 20 customers at this point. We have a variety of customers. We basically target five industry segments that we think are right for the types of analysts that we target. The five segments are high tech manufacturing, consumer products, retail, financial services, and public sector. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at use cases now that we understand what you do. Let’s do a before and after. If you were not in the picture, what are they able to do? With you in the picture, what are they able to do?

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: I’ll give you a story of my own life because this is actually how we started designing the Paxata product. If you’re an analyst today, your number one weapon of choice is Excel. That has always been the case for as long as Excel was available. When it comes to data preparation, the analyst lifecycle looks like the following. I used to get a request from one of the management teams saying, “I need you to answer this analytical question. I need you to find out which of our accounts in Europe have this many escalations logged against them, find out who is assigned to those cases, and how long they have been in operation.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 4)

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Typically what we find is that once we prepare the data, that data is then pulled by the consuming applications. However, it’s also important to note that we ourselves do persist with data. A very important part of our value proposition is the notion of data governance. We maintain and cache a copy of all the data that actually flows through our system, which means that we also keep every version of data that’s ever loaded into the system, every version of data that is transformed in our system, and every version of data that is exported. The moment a data element hits our system to the moment it goes out, >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks (Part 1)

Girish Navani has built a $300M+ private company in Healthcare IT that would be valued at over $3B if he were to take it public. We first covered the company in our Entrepreneur Journeys series [Built To Enjoy] in 2010. We continue the discussion here.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick up from where we left off about four years ago. Of course, you’re one of the key players in the healthcare IT ecosystem and started way before most of players in the current landscape. Catch me up on what’s going on and how you’ve progressed. I want to set the context of what I love about your philosophy of building the company. You’ve kept it private. When we talked in 2010, you already had thousands and thousands of customers and had substantial revenue. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It stopped being relational a long time ago.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: That’s right. So if you have S. Mitra in your relational database, Sramana M. in your tweets, and Sramana Mitraa with two A’s at the end in one of your documents, you need to be able to figure out in 2014, regardless of the schema or the structure of the data, that those are all referring to the same entity. Our machine learning techniques are able to introspect the content and come back and make a recommendation to the user so that they don’t have to figure out how to align these schemas together. That’s also an important point of our positioning.

 Sramana Mitra: If you look at the ecosystem map, where would you fit layer-wise? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 2)

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Then I went to work for SAP where I met Prakash. I was running the enterprise performance management product line – planning, budgeting, forecasting, legal consolidation, and activity-based costing. I was deeply involved in acquiring companies like Pilot Software, OutlookSoft, and then Business Objects. After an extensive process of trying to rationalize the Business Objects in SAP portfolio, I went to work in the office of the CTO at SAP. I then co-authored a book on business analytics called “Driven to Perform” where I try to take a lot of what I had learned from Sibyl, Hyperion, and SAP to put together a blueprint of what the next generation analytics landscape would look like.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the status of that capability in the Big Data industry today to be able to achieve that balance between protection, privacy, and analytics?

Ulf Mattsson: Larger companies and companies providing Big Data distributions like Cloudera and Hortonworks are actually involving third-party security companies like Protegrity to fill the security gaps. For example, Protegrity has partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosphere, Teradata, and other companies to satisfy these new types of security requirements.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Nenshad Bardoliwalla, VP of Products, Paxata (Part 1)

Big Data is all very well, but typically, the databases are full of dirty data. Before you can analyze accurately, you have to cleanse the data. Paxata has great insights to offer into the process.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Paxata as well as to yourself.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla: Paxata is an early-stage startup company. We were founded in early 2012 by four people–our CEO Prakash Nanduri, CTO Dave Brewster, Chris Maddox who runs all of our alliances and channel partners, and myself as the Head of Products. We are all enterprise software guys. >>>