Thought Leaders in Big Data: Atanas Kiryakov, CEO of OntoText (Part 3)

Atanas Kiryakov: If you want to solve this problem of massive data with any relational database, you’d probably need to hire several hundred people. Currently, we have just two employees working to maintain this data warehouse in our offices. Even at this scale, the ratio between the effort that we need to do and the effort that you need with mainstream technologies is like 1:100. It results in massive savings. This was the biggest driver for pharmaceutical companies to be early adopters of this technology many years ago. They started using it actively seven to eight years ago.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Atanas Kiryakov, CEO of Ontotext (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me drill down a bit. I don’t know if you’re familiar with my writings on this subject. I’ve written extensively on this topic. What I’d like to do is take three of your customers from three different domains, and do some use cases on how you’re applying AI technology, that you built and have expertise in solving specific business problems. For example, I saw that Euromoney is a customer. Tell us what problems you solve for Euromoney and how do you solve those problems.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Atanas Kiryakov, CEO of Ontotext (Part 1)

Semantic technologies are gaining ground in the world of Big Data. This interview focuses on some applications in various parts of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing the audience to Ontotext. Tell us who you are, where you’re based, and what kind of work you are doing.

Atanas Kiryakov: I founded Ontotext in the year 2000. We were one of the leading sites globally for artificial intelligence in the 80s through the 90s. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see services like Shutterfly going?

Matthew Dornquast: People who focus on everything will ultimately win over the specialization. There is always some new temporal period where a new format will get off, but then the large platforms absorb them.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to ask entrepreneurs to look at opportunities in the space that you really understand deeply, where would you ask them to focus? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another question on something that I asked you earlier about. Google has an incredible P&L. They have a business model that just throws out cash. They don’t want to pay that cash as taxes so they’re doing all sorts of things for the consumers and small business to benefit them. They certainly have the profitability and free cash flow to invest in enriching the feature sets and the functionality of their cloud drive offering.

There is a possibility that a lot of the low-end consumer and small business functionality requirements are going to be handled by Google just because of those dynamics. That puts some pressure on the players who actually have to make money to justify being in those businesses like yourself.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 4)

Matthew Dornquast: That’s not enough. You have a database of consumers and you want to remind them that you have a business offering. You want to encourage them to participate in that. You need the connective tissue between your marketing systems and your enterprise sales force systems so that you will be able to recognize and measure the success rate of those efforts. There are other things that you can do. Enterprise sales force is armed with free consumer cards. When they talk to professionals they say, “Try us at home. It’s the same technology. If you like what you see, we have an enterprise dashboard for you that meet all your Chief Security Officer’s concerns.” It’s a great way to introduce them to a product in a frictionless way.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I can understand why Google is doing that, but as a private company that has to make money to survive and build business value, what is the justification of being in that business of offering something for free?

Matthew Dornquast: There’re a lot of benefits for the business if you know how to harness it and in particular when you accept the reality that as a business, you need to make your money elsewhere. We make our money on the business side of the equation, but the consumer side of our offering offers us a great deal of benefits. The obvious ones are brand awareness. It’s much easier to market and sell something that’s free, and to gain adoption on something that’s free. As long as you can build trusting, reliable, high-quality relationships with individuals, they facilitate the adoption of your enterprise product in the workplace. There’s a definite marketing advantage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would some of those examples be?

Matthew Dornquast: If you think in terms of just backing up endpoint devices, that makes sense. But still a large chunk of them would say, “If it’s important, it should be in the cloud or it should be in the server room. Therefore, I should need to back up this entire device.” We say to them, “If you do a backup for the entire device, then you will be able to access all of the information on the device from any of your other devices. But when we have all the data on the device safely and securely protected and if you need to know what information was on those devices at a point in time, you will be able to answer that question.”

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