Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple more use cases from different industries.

Bob Renner: Let’s go all the way over to distribution. Two of the largest distributors in the US of a variety of industrial supplies as well as paper products leverage Liaison’s technology to pull in information about the products that they then package and sell, normalize that, and synchronize that data to their ERP systems. In one case, one of those two very large distributors has a fairly common ERP model. The other one, a direct competitor, has a geographically distributed ERP model. Both of these companies use Liaison’s cloud-based integration and data management platform as the authoritative data source for all of their products that they pull in and also a variety of attributes related to those products. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 1)

Entrepreneurs in the field of data integration would like to read this interview to get a sense of the state of the union, and identify open opportunities in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Bob, tell us about Liaison Technologies and yourself.

Bob Renner: I’ll tell you a little bit about myself first and then I’ll dive into Liaison. My background is in the technology space. I call myself a technologist by trade. I joined Liaison Technologies almost 15 years ago as a Chief Technology Officer. Then, I moved up from CTO to CEO after being with the company for a couple of years.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your corporate incubation strategy? How do you drive innovation in your company?

Paul Zolfaghari: I think our innovation strategy comes down across a couple of different vectors. We’re very interested in seeing what trends are in the industry. What are the leading visionaries talking about and thinking about? We certainly listen to our deep and very impressive customer base. Honestly, if you get the chance to talk to a Netflix, American Express, or Citibank, you’re bringing together the collective wisdom of trillions of dollars of GDP. That’s a good sample set for us to get from. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are the white spaces right now?

Paul Zolfaghari: In terms of what I think people are looking for in the market that nobody is really working on, I think you’re going to see a more pronounced interaction between gesture and gesture-based interfaces and the ability to interact with analytics and analytics benchmark. I think it’s not that far down the road before you’re going to see gesture-based technologies in the way people are interacting with their proprietary environment. Is that a white space? I don’t know. Maybe somebody’s working on it.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 5)

Paul Zolfaghari: What we have been doing as a company is ensuring that the MicroStrategy analytics and visualization layer can be that primary interface, but that where the data resides for us is becoming less and less relevant because we’re ensuring that we can attach and interact with that data wherever it is. What’s happened from a trend standpoint is that the introduction of Hadoop and Hadoop-like vendors has dramatically lowered the cost of storage and storage of data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s the modus operandi from the point of view of your large customers. Do you have customers who are independent software vendors who are also developing on top of your analytics platform, and are providing the business logic for maybe a particular vertical and then selling? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 3)

Paul Zolfaghari: For instance, yesterday I met one of our customers Netflix, which is actually running MicroStrategy against a very substantial instance of data that actually resides in AWS. Netflix is very public about this. It’s a great example for us and one that we’re very proud of. Netflix is a deep analytics company. It’s also a company that has a substantial amount of data and yet they chose to use MicroStrategy while connecting to a data source in the Amazon AWS cloud.

Sramana Mitra: You have three components to this. One is the data layer where the data is being stored. That sounds like that’s AWS. Then, the analytics infrastructure is MicroStrategy. What about the logic? I imagine what you’re talking about is the recommendation engine. Where is that logic? >>>

Starting Unicorn Companies: Tableau Software

Last November, Aileen Lee with Cowboy Ventures wrote a post on Techcrunch titled Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups. In it, she offered a list of companies that have had billion dollar exits, and analyzed some of the common threads.

In this series, I would like to look at some of the ‘unicorn’ companies that she identified, as well as some others that I know well, and one by one, explore their early stage entrepreneurial journey. The case studies we explore are all from the 1M/1M Entrepreneur Journeys series of interviews.

We begin with Tableau Software, currently trading in the public market under the symbol DATA with a ~$3.5 billion market cap.

>>>