Thought Leaders in Big Data: Charlie Lougheed, Co-Founder and President of Explorys (Part 2)

Charlie Lougheed: We formed Explorys in 2009 when we met Dr. Anil Jain, a physician at the Cleveland clinic. Anil was not just a clinician, but he was also responsible for their e-research initiatives around leveraging electronic data and EMR. Some of the things that he and his team had invented really inspired us to form this company, take it to the cloud, and roll it out nationally. That was more or less the journey. It was an exciting process.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit more about what specifically Explorys does and how does that situate you in the industry. What is the ecosystem that you’re playing in and how do you position yourself in that spectrum? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Charlie Lougheed, Co-Founder and President of Explorys (Part 1)

In our review of various Big Data players working on vertical apps, this time, we bring you a Healthcare IT story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introductions. Please talk a little bit about yourself as well as Explorys.

Charlie Lougheed: Explorys is my third company. I was in my mid-teens when I started my first one. I was always driven to technology and entrepreneurship. I have this strange hybrid of experience in that I’ve spent a good amount of my career in large corporations as well. I’ve spent a good amount of time in the financial services sector, primarily around extending their online channel. I was responsible for both the technology as well as the business side. It was an interesting exposure. To some >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: San Francisco is very expensive right now but I don’t think it’s as expensive as London or New York.

Peter Bauer: I do have some funny stories. During the interviewing process, there were some guys living in Spain. You realize that these are top class. You get talking about pay and ask for their expectations. Then they say, “Maybe 40,000 pounds a year.” You have to say, “I don’t know how to put this, but we’re going to have to insist that you take at least 55,000 pounds.” They say, “Wow!” Then you would say to him, “Come over here. Look for a flat.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 6)

Peter Bauer: The opportunity of multi-tenant architectures in a cloud world that required an awful lot of software to be rewritten to be able to leverage the massively powerful hardware, which was fast becoming commoditized, and the massive networks were allowing SaaS to emerge as a theme. We put all these ideas together and decided to start building our platform. Eventually, we ran out of money. We were fortunate our wives were particularly patient with us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We do a lot of business development work and customer service work. All of that is going into different mailboxes in my Apple mail, and then Bcc on to our CRM system which is getting stored in context related to the contact to whom that thread is related to. This is my workflow. It’s an immense amount of data. I dread to see what happens to that in a few years. It’s already a very expensive mail client that is full of stuff.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 4)

Peter Bauer: My concern with that approach is it’s immature right now. It will be for a while. Since it’s unreliable, it’s also difficult to predict. You don’t know how information is going to be suggested to you. You don’t know what the underlying mechanism is. It can really be a distraction in the same way that something like Siri was hailed as someone super clever that can help you with all sorts of stuff. But I think a vast majority of people have left it alone and are waiting for some future iteration where Siri may be profoundly useful. It’s just not clever enough. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? I imagine you probably have a tiered pricing model but how do you break it down?

Peter Bauer: The beauty of SaaS, as you know, is subscription-based pricing. The beauty of our platform is that it’s very flexible. You can almost pay per use case. You can subscribe to a use case. We have very broad solutions, so if you’re interested in large file sending, you can subscribe to that. If you’re just an email security firm, you can subscribe to that. It’s per user per year depending on which services you add and leverage.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your competitor? It sounds like there are competitors in each of those buckets as well as perhaps competitors who offer all of those.

Peter Bauer: That’s absolutely right. Most of the solutions were designed when computing was largely a LAN-based activity and companies were running things themselves. Some of the bigger players are companies like Symantec and Barracuda. There’re products from HP Autonomy as well. While these companies are quite big and they may offer solutions in each of these areas, each of those products are different in two different important ways. One is they are disparate products. They’re not integrated. >>>