Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Cloud is a very large practice for us. One of the big trends driving both cloud and mobile, and to some extend Big Data, are these platforms. There are lots of platforms now available as a service that you can build upon. We’re seeing that as a major phenomenon because you no longer have to build the whole stack. When you were trying to start a company in the ’90s or even in the 2000 decade, for a long time you had to build the whole stack. Now, you can just take advantage of other people’s stacks and add the value-added layer on top without having to deal with the plumbing. That makes it a lot cheaper to bring a product to market for a small company.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy (Part 1)

This interview has a very interesting discussion on the future of user interfaces that interact with data. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Paul, let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as to MicroStrategy.

Paul Zolfaghari: I’m Paul Zolfaghari. I’m the president of MicroStrategy. We’re an enterprise software company that’s been in existence for 25 years. We went public in 1998. As an overall background of the company, we are a global company with global operations. We operate directly in 26 countries around the world. We’ve got north of 4,000 customers across a multitude of industries. In 2013, our revenue was just short of $600 million and we consider ourselves the leader in analytics, business >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. If you were starting a company today, what unsolved problem would you be looking at?

Radhika Subramanian: Education.

Sramana Mitra: What about education? Have you given it any further thought? Education is going through a massive disruption right now.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think what made Google happen is their business model innovation.

Radhika Subramanian: It was their business model, but it was also the fact that it was ranked search as opposed to just search. There are some of those parallels here as well. I don’t know how many times we hear this where companies will tell us, “We have this Big Data solution, but it’s manually intensive. The setup is really high.” We often hear, “A lot of these products are software-enabled services. These companies are using software as a way to actually bring you professional services.” The software becomes a way for them to line up 20 to 30 of their people and say, “Well, you’re going to need our people because our people are going to do the data modeling.” That’s not really automation.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are there any competitors that offer that?

Radhika Subramanian: Not exactly in this one thing that Emcien does well, which is complete automation of the analysis. In that one thing, we do not have a direct competitor. In that, I think, we’re creating this blue ocean strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Since we’ve already done use cases and competitive map, let’s go to the next part of the discussion. What are the trends that you’re tracking in your industry? Where do you see this industry going? Obviously, it has become very hot especially in the last couple of years. I think it’s not just hype. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 4)

Radhika Subramanian: It’s a method that extracts all of those queries – what we call non-node queries. Send the data and say, “These are all the questions you should have asked. I’m going to rank it for you the way Google does. With that, I will isolate just the core of what you need to know.” Let me give this to you in an example so that it’s not so abstract. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you please position this for me in the context of your competitive landscape? We’ve tons of Big Data companies. We’ve seen this problem from many different angles. I’d like you to get granular in positioning your product based on exactly what you do.

Radhika Subramanian: If you have data, the three steps in analyzing around data are collect, analyze, and report. Those are the three steps. There are tons and tons of companies that are in the collection and storage space. It’s very mature and growing fast. Tons of innovation is happening there. Emcien has nothing to do with that. Let’s now go to the reporting side. Reporting was born because once you started taking data and shoving it to databases, businesses really struggle to get the data out. That’s really how BI was born. That’s reporting. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Were you still based in Georgia?

Radhika Subramanian: All this was happening in Atlanta, yes. Literally, on Georgia Tech campus. I launched the company at ATDC which is the Georgia Tech Incubator. They reached out and funneled millions of dollars into Emcien. Then, we started to do the first implementation and the payback was huge. It was phenomenal. The customers were Caterpillar and John Deere.

The dealers of these companies are huge. They are big billion dollar companies. We did a private placement with Adco, which is a dealer of Caterpillar, and did our Series A round. We started to build the company. Then the dot com burst happened. When the manufacturing and financial downturn happened, I thought, “Okay, Radhika how are you going to get up from that?”

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